Conference: IEEE ISTAS International Symposium on Technology and Society 2015
This year’s conference of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT), ISTAS 2015, was held close to Dublin, in the lovely 12th century heritage town of Malahide and featured a wealth of tracks, covering topics ranging from Technology and Development and Professional and Research Ethics all the way to Robot Ethics and Technological Forecasting. Aside from being brilliantly organised and brimming with excellent speakers and presentations, this was also my first conference that was opened by the president of the hosting country (Michael D. Higgins) himself. A wholly enjoyable experience and definitely a conference I will be return to.
The paper I presented was part of the “Impact of Consumer Electronics” track and titled Pocket Psychopaths – An Anthropomorphic Intentional Stance to Facilitate Moral Intuitions about (Consumer) Technology. With a title that is, admittedly, quite a mouth full, this paper suggests to view certain technologies as anthropomorphic representations rather than abstract constructs in order to make it easier to understand their moral dimensions on a more intuitive level. The paper can be found in the conference proceedings and IEEE Xplore.
As mentioned above, this conference had many excellent and interesting presentations, making it very hard to pick out a particularly good one. Nevertheless, my pick for the most notable paper goes to: Cathryn Peoples, The Cloud Afterlife: Managing your Digital Legacy, most importantly because it made me realise that I too had not properly prepared for my potential death and digital legacy (and still haven’t).