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Prof. Bernd Stahl (University of Nottingham)Smart information systems (SIS) are systems that incorporate artificial intelligence techniques, in particular machine learning and big data analytics. These raise significant hopes, for example to better understand and cure diseases, but also to revolutionise transport, to optimise business processes or reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, they raise many ethical and social concerns, ranging from worries about biases and resulting discrimination to the distribution of socio-economic and political power and their impact on democracy. Drawing on the findings of the SHERPA project (www.project-sherpa.eu), the presentation will suggest that one perspective to better understand these systems and their social and ethical consequences is to use the metaphor of an ecosystem to describe them, a metaphor already widely used in the policy discourse on AI. The talk will analyse what the use of the ecosystem metaphor means for the evaluation of ethical issues of smart information systems and which conclusions can be drawn from it and how these can inform recommendations for policymakers and other stakeholders. The presentation is based on the material developed in a book, which is freely available from: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-69978-9 Professor of Critical Research in Technology, Bernd Stahl's research interests cover philosophical issues arising from the intersections of business, technology, and information. This includes ethical questions of current and emerging of ICTs, critical approaches to information systems and issues related to responsible research and innovation. From 2013 to 2023 he was a member of the EU Future and Emerging Technology Flagship project Human Brain Project. Prof. Stahl has been working on the integration of responsible (research and) innovation in ICT research through a number of projects which led to the creation of the non-profit Observatory for RRI in ICT (ORBIT) which has now taken the form of a non-profit spin-out company jointly owned by the University of Oxford, De Montfort University and its directors (including Prof. Stahl). At present Prof. Stahl is particularly interested in exploring the role of the metaphor of an ecosystem when exploring ethical and social issues of emerging technologies, such as AI. Between 2003 and 2023 he was a member of the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility of De Montfort University, serving as its director between July 2010 and September 2022. From 2000 to 2003 Prof. Stahl was a lecturer with a joint appointment at the German Department and the Department of Information Systems of University College Dublin, Ireland From 1998 to 2003 worked on his PhD and held a research assistant position at the University of Witten / Herdecke in Germany. Between 1987 and 1997 he served as an officer of the German army.
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