Digital technology and responsible innovations

Contact person: Truls Erikson    
Keywords: Digital technology, responsible innovations, regulatory sandbox, ethics.    
Research groups: Entrepreneurship (ENT)    
Department of Informatics

Along with the speed of new digital technology and novel and powerful solutions comes a vision of both future utopias and dystopias, including the social and ethical repercussions. As new digital technologies are increasingly developed and deployed, we must pay closer attention to ethical deliberations under conditions of not only known, but also unknown and unknowable uncertainty. One viable mechanism introduced to promote responsible innovations is the regulatory sandboxes for digital technology, placing dialogue between regulators and high-tech innovators and entrepreneurs at the center of the process. These regulatory sandboxes reflect viable research sites where acts of prospection take place and where actors engage in projective deliberation. As such, these sandboxes not only serve as sites for hyper-projectivity but are also sites for elevated public debates regarding not just plausible futures, but also desirable ones.

We seek a postdoc who can address related themes, drawing on philosophical, computational, and linguistic methods.    

  • What is the role of regulatory sandboxes in the large-scale societal transformation to a society radically shaped by digital technology? 
  • What kind of visions of the future are constructed conversationally in the regulatory sandbox?
  • What are the methodological toolkits with regard to performing desirable futures?
  • How do highly innovative tech entrepreneurs construct and shape desirable futures? 
  • What can we learn from regulatory sandboxes on digital technology enacted in various industries and markets, and what role does sustainability play in this regard?    

Mentoring and internship will be offered by a relevant external partner.