Date : June 25, from 9 AM to 6 PM
Place : Le Méditel, 28 bd Pasteur, Paris 15ème
Free admission
Pre-registration required at contact@voxinternet.org

Presentation

The annual ICANN international meeting will be held in Paris from June 21st to 28th. On May 29th, the French Deputy-Minister newly in charge of the develpment of digital economy is opening a conference series aimed at « developing economic growth and competitiveness ». Various collective initiatives are emerging to prepare the next Internet Governance Forum meeting (Hyderabad, December 2008) and to create national or regional IGFs. However great uncertainties remain as to whether the multistakeholder approach (promoted by the UN-World Summit on Information Society) can actually lead to « multilateral, transparent and democratic » Internet Governance.
Moreover, the upcoming boom of « the Internet of things » in daily life and the extension of GRID technologies raise genuine anthropological questions. The pervasive or invasive Internet, the Ambient Intelligence, the lack of clarity regarding information gates, are still scarcely outlined subjects when dealing with the Internet Governance topic. The public debates in recent years focused on procedures and instruments with weak legitimacy. Thus they seem to sacrifice the constant innovation of the network of networks, and the social stakes in a so-called globalized world, to the endless quest for a consensus between the different categories of actors: the idea of « global governance » evades the normative fondations of its possible construction. What will happen if the next Internet success story comes not from the West but from Asia ? … Perhaps, we could change the Internet Governance analysis framework: by considering the numerous intertwined networks of communities, researchers, contents, things ; by attempting to reassess the « basics » which inspired the WSIS.
The construction of Internet has been historically and technically shared. The political challenge is to reorient it towards the construction of a global common good. The scientifical challenge is to analyse the current transformations of normativity - beyond procedural governance, its structural unsteadiness and its non-political instruments. Which dynamics can be found, at the cross-road where the twofold construction of rights and ethics meet ? What kinds of communicationnal devices could allow for responsibility and reciprocity ?
Such a reflexive Internet Governance converges with other issues (access to medicines, biodiversity protection, extension of the rights to the living world and artificial creations) that are taking their place -with difficulty but gradually- in the international interplay of knowledge, values and powers.
This workshop aims at opening up some new paths for research and public policy. It will give the floor to four communications and allow time for a broad discussion .

Program

Presentation by Françoise Massit-Folléa (Scientific coordinator, Vox Internet II)

Speakers:

Rafael Capurro (International Review of Information Ethics / Stuttgart University)
The Quest for Intercultural Information Ethics

The aim of Intercultural Information Ethics (IEE) is to provide a careful situational analysis and critical appraisal on the way(s) computers control societies. The present debate on Information Ethics emphazises the question of Privacy but other issues are concerned: Intellectual Property, Online Communities, Governmentality, Gender Issues, Health Care, Mobility, Digital Divide. In a narrow sense, IEE deals with the impact of ICT on different cultures as well as on how specific ethical ICT issues are understood from different cultural traditions. In a broad sense, IEE deals with ethical questions raised by other (than digital) information and communication media, allowing a large historical cross-media comparative view. IIE explores these issues under descriptive and normative perspectives. In this regard it questions the universality of values vs. the locality of cultures - and vice versa, relating to the problem of homogenization and hybridization of information cultures and practices in a (being) connected world.

Soenke Zehle (Transcultural Media Studies Project, Saarbruck University):
From Civil Society to ‘Technologies of the Common’ - Social Software and Collaborative Ethics

The arrival and generalization of social software – under the convenient name Web2 .0 - was greeted with a wave of economic enthusiasm (new markets), as well as a corresponding sense of political possibility regarding remedies to the ’democracy deficit’. The EU has identified the ‘economy of culture’ as a policy priority, and the related documents describe in fact an emergent policy regime. The UN World Summit on Information Society developed the ambitious (and ambiguous) strategy of multistakeholderism, with the ’inclusion of civil society’ as a central element of post-sovereign paradigms of diplomacy and governance. Yet the assumption that ’civil society’ serves as primary vehicle of democratization will be confronted to another vision : the notion of ’technologies of the common’, which considers the modalities of collective refusal-defection-withdrawal as a terrain of democracy outside the conceptual and organizational idiom of representation. Situated between social technologies and techniques of governance, ’technologies of the common’ can serve as a heuristic device to explore differences and similarities of related processes of social constitution and identify their relevance to the articulation of alternative modalities of governance.

Jean-Gabriel Ganascia (LIP6, CNRS/Université Paris 6)
An Artificial Intelligence-Based Formalization of Robot Ethics

Artificial agents are invited to play a more and more important role in the modern society where they act as intermediaries between humans and between humans and machines. In the near future, they will take such a part in our everyday life that the world would become a nightmare without them. And it would be more terrifying yet if they would suddenly act unethically. But, what does it mean for an artificial agent to be unethical or to act unethically? The first answer consists in evaluating from the outside the morality of artificial agents, using empirical methodologies and observing the behaviors of existing robots. The second way is a constructive one: it tries to consider a given set of ethical commitments and to suppose that a robot has to decide, in each circumstance, the one which has to be applied. Inspired by Asimov’s short story “Runaround” (1942), computational ethics is studying, for instance, how web agents could respect privacy; how automated hospital agents have to respect patients and their pain, etc. This raises difficult questions. May artificial agents lie? Most of us would say that they shouldn’t. Or do they have to tell all they know? It surely depends on the context and the situation. The presentation will deal with such problems; more precisely, using modern logic-based artificial intelligence techniques, it proposes to model ethical rules in a way that could be useful to design artificial agents.

Mireille Hildebrandt (Free University Brussels / Erasmus University Rotterdam)
The impact of digitalisation on the linear structure of modern law

Digitalisation raises some fundamental issues at the intersection of law, political theory and human identity, as it concerns non-humans, individuals and groups of humans. For instance, data-mining technologies provide profiles with a flux of instant-categorisations that will be adjusted in real time if the Ambient Intelligent vision (promoted by EU R&D) comes through. What kind of a human-non human environment would be built? Will individuals be aware of its impact and functioning and does it matter if they are not? How can abuse (from corporations or governments) be prevented? Before building such an infrastructure, it is necessary to carefully research legal and technological possibilities to protect the positive and negative freedom of citizens. The questions are how to reconstruct the checks and balances in order to protecting or revisiting the historical artefacts of democracy and rule of law.

Access

Le Méditel
28 bd Pasteur
Paris, 15ème

Métro Pasteur (lignes 6 et 12)
Bus 39 – 70 – 88 – 89 – 91 – 95

Contact

Vox Internet II
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme- Bureau 04
54 boulevard Raspail
75006 Paris
France

(33)1 49 54 21 93
contact@voxinternet.org