IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 72

Technological Stewardship and Responsible Innovation
systems with a value focus. Like VSD, VBE develops
positive, value-rich visions of what technology could
do for society. It embraces technology as an opportunity
to benefit humanity. Like VSD, it also recognizes
what can go wrong with technology, through what
design aspects values might be harmed. Unlike VSD,
however, it ensures that through a traceable, replicable,
and iterative process, value harms and benefits
are systematically and technically addressed and
monitored. VBE also recognizes that in order for this
to happen, developers' nonvalue-based functional
product roadmaps need to be integrated with value-based
requirements. It recognizes that appropriate
organizational conditions need to be in place for
innovation teams and developers that provide the
necessary time, autonomy, and ethical guidance.
And it embeds a value ontology and value definition
that (unlike VSD) is grounded in a postphenomenological
account of value actualization [9], [10].
With this contribution, VBE also goes beyond
what technology providers and policymakers currently
understand by digital ethics. Over 80 institutions
worldwide (including the EU Commission [11]
and the OECD [12]) have developed public value
commitment lists in the last few years, especially
with a view to AI. Indeed, if the five most accepted
values on these lists--that is, system transparency,
fairness, nonmaleficence (safety/security), accountability,
and privacy--were regularly taught to engineers,
fully understood, and rigorously implemented
as IT " hygiene factors, " then we would certainly witness
more people-friendly and social digitization.
But these harm-avoiding principle-lists do not allow
for saying that a system is really " ethical " in the sense
that its purpose is to cater toward " the good. " This is
what VBE does as it " bases " tech innovators' systems
systematically on a positive value mission.
VBE was first sketched out in the primitive form
in 2016 [13] and then diligently evolved over a
five-year standardization process that is called the
IEEE 7000 standard, " A Model process for addressing
Ethical Concerns during System Design " [14],
[15]. The diligence of the development process has
been presented in this magazine previously [15]. In
the following, I will broadly describe how VBE with
IEEE 7000 works, what its most important constructs
are, what literature it is based on, how it relates to
other influential work on values and ethics in system
design, and what its own challenges are.
72
Prerequisites for value elicitation
To grasp what can be understood by ethical IT
design, consider the following example of how
voice assistants can operate completely differently
depending on the culture in which they are developed:
In 2017, when a user said " I am so sad, " a
U.S. Alexa device replied " I wish I had arms to cuddle
you. " The Russian counterpart Yandex, on the
other hand, replied to the same statement " No one
said life is a fun event " [16]. Reading these two
completely different answers raises the question:
Have the developers of the dialog systems actually
consciously thought about the ethical implications
of the systems' answers? Have they considered that
these express distinct values and that--depending
on the diffusion of the system--these could significantly
influence users' attitudes to life, for instance,
children growing up with the system? In fact: Which
answer would actually be the more correct one?
The American or the Russian one? Thinking about
this last question goes to the heart of ethical system
design: " How should I act? " [17] " I, " that is, the engineer
of the dialog system. How do I give the voice
assistant the " right, " " good, " or " wise " dialog? The
answer to this question is a function of the values
one wants to pass on to a system.
In this example, it is up for discussion whether the
voice assistant should rather promote the virtue of
mental toughness, personality robustness, and discipline--or
focus on feeling good, conveying closeness,
and compassion. The decision taken has an
important value-ethical impact on society once the
respective voice assistant is used at a massive scale.
It should, therefore, be answered by innovation
teams with a great sense of responsibility, a responsibility
that takes time, ethical guidance, and work
conditions often not provided these days to system
developers [18].
VBE intends to provide for this. If organizations
make use of it and seek compliance with IEEE 7000,
then processes are established to grant engineering
and innovation teams the time to engage in value
reflection. IEEE 7000 outlines in its introduction that
the following organizational conditions must also be
met [14, p. 9]:
* readiness to include a wide group of stakeholders
in the engineering effort;
* an open, transparent, and inclusive project
culture;
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

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