New open access article out in Big Data & Society, titled “Problem-solving? No, problem-opening! A Method to Reframe and Teach Data Ethics as a Transdisciplinary Endeavour” and authored together with Hendrik Ploeger.

I particularly care about this article because it not only advances a critique of the mainstream (positivist) approach to data ethics and technology governance by proposing an alternative standpoint, but discusses the application and results of a pedagogical experience based on this critique and standpoint.

Philosophy has taught us that technology is pharmakon – both poison and antidote – or, as Melvin Kranzberg’s first law encapsulates well, “Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral“. This means that, at all times, technology can have both positive and negative (un)intended consequences, whenever it is applied in context, insofar as its uses generate value-laden entanglements that cannot be easily taken apart and rather they demand to be assessed from different perspectives, simultaneously, and over time.

This is an inherent transdisciplinary endeavor, that is, an uncertainty-based way of thinking and doing, which cuts across epistemologies, resists any privilege point of reference, and configures an ongoing multidimensional analysis – or, as we call it, a problem opening approach.

Guidelines and frameworks that tell us how to handle data and AI are certainly important – but it is equally important to enact a complementary standpoint which recognizes the sociotechnical complexity of the scenario we are enmeshed it, leading to develop non-solutionist approaches for governing fairly and sustainably such an ever-evolving scenario.

This article provides a first concrete example in this direction, especially with regard to technological education. Notably, the article enacts two pillars – entanglement and uncertainty – fundamental to the quantum ecology as an epistemological framework, as we have developed it, together with Derrick de Kerckhove in our upcoming book, for MIT Press, Quantum Ecology: Why and How New Information Technologies Will Reshape Societies.

In the theoretical part of this article we advance a paradigm shift from normative (do vs don’t) and axiomatic (good vs bad) data ethics towards a non-normative and non-axiomatic standpoint. In the practical part, we describe how we operationalized such a shift into an elective course titled “Ethics for the Data-driven city” that we designed and taught over the last three years as part of the TU Delft Geomatics master program within the Department of Urbanism. The article also contains the syllabus of the course.