Last week, I was at 4TU.Ethics/ESDiT International Conference, held at Wageningen University.

The conference, titled Technology Ethics in Turbulent Times: Expanding the Moral Agenda for Transformation, was the chance to present ongoing work on the ethics of quantum information technologies (QITs): Rethinking Ethics of Technology in the Quantum Age: An Ultra-Phenomenological Approach to Quantum Sensing.

Specifically, I discussed how, by leveraging the quantum ecology as a framework pivoting around fundamental uncertainty, entanglement, superposition and enacting onto-epistemological probability, it becomes possible to rethink technology and ethics beyond essentialist-referential terms, i.e., beyond our unquestioned Cartesian-Newtonian framing of reality. To concretize this idea, I focused on quantum sensing (QS), as the most mature of the three classes of QITs.

Differently from classical technologies, such as the telescope or the microscope which work as prosthetic apparatuses connecting and, in so doing, co-constituting the observed object and the observing subject, QS leverages quantum objects and quantum effects to synthetise physical phenomena. This means that quantum objects and effects do not indexically co-constitute referent and observer: there is no referential link between the quantum object or phenomena and, say, a detected neurological activity through a quantum neuro-device. Instead, quantum object and effects stand as ultra-phenomenological proxies for the observer-observed entanglement.

Hence, QS enacts a proximation of the sensible, whereby the synthesis of physical phenomena and their manipulation occur within a space of possibility, rather than through co-constitutive referentiality.

This, in turn, disrupt of the linear link classically connecting the use of a technology (as a tool) to its effects (e.g., compliance with ethical values). Beyond treating technology as self-standing artifacts and ethical values as isolated referential targets, the “ethics + technology” pair shall be reconsidered as a fundamentally uncertain enactment within an onto-epistemological space of possibility.

From here, I proposed the redesign of the OECD’s ethical values for QITs as ethical space vectors to better accommodate mutual synergy and facilitate an overall ethical balance – and I applied such redesign to the specific case of quantum neuro-devices across their whole life cycle (development, deployment, use).

Note that this proposition remains descriptive and does not question the validity itself of the identified values. At the same time, such proposition might also be extended to other QITs and, retrospectively, challenge the (constructed) phenomenological referentiality of classical technologies.

Here the slides.