Justin B. Biddle
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Abstract:

This presentation addresses the question of how organizations should be structured if they are to facilitate responsible innovation. Organizations of all sorts – including governments, academic institutes, and firms – have implemented different structures for facilitating responsible decision making in science, technology, and innovation. These include external ethics advisory boards, internal ethics offices, and external auditing bodies. While there are practical questions that one might ask about the effectiveness of these structures, there are also interesting conceptual/philosophical issues, which have largely been ignored by philosophers of science, STS scholars, and others. This presentation explores some of these issues. It proposes and articulates three characteristics that an ideal responsible innovation structure might have – namely, information access, empowerment, and independence. It then shows that, under realistic conditions, responsible innovation structures face tradeoffs that make this ideal difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. This argument is referred to as the Triangle of Responsible Innovation (TRI). It helps to explain why responsible innovation is so difficult to institutionalize. It also suggests pathways for making progress toward responsible innovation, even given these challenges.

Justin B. Biddle is an Associate Professor in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy and the Director of the Ethics, Technology, and Human Interaction at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also a Senior Fellow of SOCRATES (“Social Credibility and Trustworthiness of Expert Knowledge and Science-Based Information”), a German Research Foundation Centre for Advanced Studies, at the Leibniz Universität Hannover. His research lies at the intersection of philosophy of science and values; ethics of emerging technologies; and organization theory. Specifically, his work investigates the epistemic and ethical implications of different organizational structures for facilitating responsible innovation, especially relating to artificial intelligence (AI). He received his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Notre Dame and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Universität Bielefeld in Germany.