To help tackle the spread of COVID-19 a range of surveillance technologies – smartphone apps, facial recognition and thermal cameras, biometric wearables, smart helmets, drones, and predictive anal...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13562576.2020.1770587

Civil liberties or public health, or civil liberties and public health? Using surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of COVID-19

Microbiome science asserts humans are made up of more microbial cells and genes than human ones, and that each person harbors their own unique microbial population. Human microbiome studies gesture...

Race in the Microbiome

Artificial intelligence can and should help to build a greener, more sustainable world and to deal with climate change. But these opportunities also raise ethical and political issues that need to be addressed if this project is to be successful. For example, the use of AI and the required data centers may involve high energy consumption, vulnerability to climate change and impact of climate measures differ across the globe and raise issues of justice, and when dealing with climate change in a way that influences or governs human behavior, there are trade-offs between effective measures that mitigate climate change and respecting human freedom. AI may also contribute to increasing humanity’s hyper agency in relation to the planet, thus adding to what is known as the problem of the “Anthropocene”. This article outlines and discusses these issues, with a focus on problems concerning freedom and justice at a global level, and calls for responsible use of AI for climate in the light of these challenges.

/pdf/ai-for-climate-freedom-justice-and-other-ethical-and-116wdv0hcq.pdf

AI for climate: freedom, justice, and other ethical and political challenges

As digital labour becomes more widespread across the uneven geographies of race, gender, class and ability, and as histories of colonialism and inequality get drawn into these forms of labour, our ...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0141778919879744

Of Techno-Ethics and Techno-Affects:

This paper revisits the term “unintended consequences,” drawing upon an illustrative vignette to show how it is used to dismiss vital ethical and political concerns. Tracing the term to its original introduction by Robert Merton and building on feminist technoscience analyses, we uncover and rethink its widespread usage in popular and scholarly discourses and practices of technology design.

/pdf/unintended-by-design-on-the-political-uses-of-unintended-qdbeu3n19r.pdf

Unintended by Design: On the Political Uses of “Unintended Consequences”

I read this book against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. During this time in the UK several high-profile reports ...

Nimal Jude

Papers

Race After Technology: by Ruha Benjamin, Polity Press, UK and USA, 2019, £11.99, IBSN-13: 978-1-5095-2639-0