IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021 - 99

Last Word
What to Expect From IEEE 7000: The First
Standard for Building Ethical Systems
S. Spiekermann
Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU),
1020 Vienna, Austria
 IEEE 7000™ Is a long-awaited standard promising
organizations the " ethical specs " [1] that seem to
be overdue in engineering roadmaps. One hundred
and fifty-four experts were, at some point, involved in
IEEE 7000, 34 being Workgroup (WG) members. Seventy-seven
experts balloted for its publication in 2021
(93% acceptance rate). In this article, I want to give a
short overview of what to expect from IEEE 7000 and
how it came about. The 79-page normative standard,
involved hundreds of online discussions over five
years, engaging self-selected individuals stemming from
many cultures (Europe, Middle East, the United States,
Australia, and Latin America) and a broad set of professional
backgrounds (engineers, philosophers, theologists,
consultants, etc.). There was one core question
to be answered: How can tech organizations of whatever
size and industry build more ethical systems? But
what is " ethical? " When laymen hear the word " ethics, "
they easily confound it with " morals. " This is not how
the IEEE 7000 WG refers to it. Instead, IEEE 7000 guides
developers in making their products and services compatible
with the ethical values of the communities in
which technical products and services are placed and
used. The standard gives step-by-step guidance to organizations
on how to care for stakeholder values from the
early conception of a system all through its development
(and depending on its reading, during later deployment).
Organizations that envision building technology
for humanity (instead of only profit) get an answer to
the Kantian question " How should I act " ? I, the engineer,
and I, the manager. How should the organization
prepare for an IT project? How should it elicit and prioritize
values? How can it ensure that prioritized values
are ending up in the system-of-interest (SOI)? And how
can the organizational and technical engineers transparently
share their value mission and effort?
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3104386
Date of current version: 2 September 2021.
September 2021
To answer these questions, the IEEE 7000 WG has
sought to respect prior scholarly work, especially
value sensitive design (VSD), participatory design,
privacy by design, virtue ethics, material value ethics,
and HCI. To elicit values of ethical relevance,
the standard applies utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and
duty ethics and recommends to also reach out to the
culturally and spiritually founded ethical traditions
of local cultures. Values in IEEE 7000 are understood
not only as critical issues that need to be fixed in
order to not be evil, but instead are regarded in line
with Max Scheler's Material Value Ethics [2] and the
post-phenomenological tradition: they are desirable
qualities woven into our world and worthwhile to
be borne by technology in order to positively enrich
humans' technical co-evolution.
Coming about and themes addressed
Building a process framework like IEEE 7000 has not
been an easy task. The development of the standard
went through three phases. At the kick-off in 2016, the
starting point was my textbook Ethical IT Innovation -
A Value-Based System Design Approach [3] that already
recognized VSD [4], risk-assessment-based design [5],
participatory design, and Mumford's ethics method. This
baseline implied that IEEE 7000 would focus on how to
embed value principles into systems (including virtues)
and that a system can (of course) only be conceived
of as a " socio-technical " one. Due to VSD, it seemed
clear that IEEE 7000 would need to include a bottom-up
value exploration and conceptual analysis rather than
embrace preconceived value principles' lists.
During the first project months, WG members formulated
their expectations on the standard through two surveys.
Industry input, expert presentations, and existing
literature were consulted. Based on this input, we decided
that IEEE 7000 should not primarily be about " better
AI, " algorithmic accountability, or ethical algorithms.
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