Wessel Reijers

Introduction to Ethics of Emerging Technologies offers a set of lecture and seminar course materials for teaching ethics of emerging technologies. It covers the field in a comprehensive and accessible manner, emphasizing storytelling and examples, practical approaches and tools, and interactive assignments. The book addresses historical and current discourses, both academic and practical, related to the ethics of emerging technologies. This includes a basic introduction to normative ethics and applied ethics of technology, an accessible entry point to theories of technology and normativity, particular technological themes (engineering ethics, ethics of AI, and ethics of biotechnologies), as well as societal contexts in which emerging technologies play a pivotal role (citizenship, sustainability, and global inequality). This book is a must-read for science and engineering students who want to engage with the ethical impacts of their future work and research; for philosophy students who want to know more about emerging technologies; for researchers and educators interested in developing technology ethics curricula; and for general readers interested in the topic.

An engaging and comprehensive exploration of how fundamental ideas in political and legal thought shape the governance of blockchain communities, and are, in turn, shaped by blockchain technology. How can digital cash truly be 'trustless'? What does it mean that blockchain offers a new paradigm of the 'rule of code'? How are decisions made when a blockchain system faces an emergency, and who gets to make those decisions? In Blockchain Governance, Primavera De Filippi, Wessel Reijers, and Morshed Mannan offer answers to these questions and more, in an accessible, critical overview of legal and political issues related to blockchain technology, now the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar industry. Moving beyond the hype, they show how blockchain offers fertile ground for experimentation with radically new ways to govern people and institutions. Blockchain-based systems, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos, and countless others, offer new ways of organizing digital cash, 'smart' contracts to execute transactions, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to collect art, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to coordinate humans and machines. What these applications have in common is that they govern the behavior of people and artificial agents through distributed systems. Drawing from their extensive experience in researching blockchain technologies and communities, the authors discuss the origins of Bitcoin in cypher-anarchism and extropianism, spectacular events like the million-dollar theft of the DAO Attack, and the hostile takeover of the Steem platform. While engaging with political and legal thinkers such as Hobbes, Kelsen, and the Ostroms, these narratives explore how blockchain governance problematizes fundamental concepts such as rule of law, sovereignty, legality, legitimacy, and polycentric governance.

This book proposes that technologies, similar to texts, novels and movies, ‘tell stories’ and thereby configure our lifeworld in the Digital Age. The impact of technologies on our lived experience is ever increasing: innovations in robotics challenge the nature of work, emerging biotechnologies impact our sense of self, and blockchain-based smart contracts profoundly transform interpersonal relations. In their exploration of the significance of these technologies, Reijers and Coeckelbergh build on the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricouer to construct a new, narrative approach to the philosophy and ethics of technology. The authors take the reader on a journey: from a discussion of the philosophy of praxis, via a hermeneutic notion of technical practice that draws on MacIntyre, Heidegger and Ricoeur, through the virtue ethics of Vallor, and Ricoeur’s ethical aim, to the eventual construction of a practice method which can guide ethics in research and innovation. In itscreation of a compelling hermeneutic ethics of technology, the book offers a concrete framework for practitioners to incorporate ethics in everyday technical practice.

This book proposes that technologies, similar to texts, novels and movies, ‘tell stories’ and thereby configure our lifeworld in the Digital Age. The impact of technologies on our lived experience is ever increasing: innovations in robotics challenge the nature of work, emerging biotechnologies impact our sense of self, and blockchain-based smart contracts profoundly transform interpersonal relations. In their exploration of the significance of these technologies, Reijers and Coeckelbergh build on the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricouer to construct a new, narrative approach to the philosophy and ethics of technology. The authors take the reader on a journey: from a discussion of the philosophy of praxis, via a hermeneutic notion of technical practice that draws on MacIntyre, Heidegger and Ricoeur, through the virtue ethics of Vallor, and Ricoeur’s ethical aim, to the eventual construction of a practice method which can guide ethics in research and innovation. In itscreation of a compelling hermeneutic ethics of technology, the book offers a concrete framework for practitioners to incorporate ethics in everyday technical practice.