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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3901/preface.pdf
Preface
Thomas Olsson 2, Otto Sahlgren2, Jaana Parviainen2, Salla Westerstrand3, J. Tuomas
Harviainen 2, Arto Laitinen2, and Juho Rantala2
1
Tampere University, Faculty of Information Systems and Communication Sciences, Tampere, Finland
2
Tampere University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere, Finland
3
University of Turku, Information Systems Science, Turku, Finland
The 7th Conference on Technology Ethics (TETHICS2024) was held in Tampere, Finland, on 6.-
7.11.2024. The organizing committee included Thomas Olsson, Otto Sahlgren, Jaana Parviainen, J.
Tuomas Harviainen, Arto Laitinen, and Juho Rantala from Tampere University as well as Salla
Westerstrand from the University of Turku, with assistance from the previous organizers from the
Future Ethics research group. TETHICS2024 continues a trend of steady growth, gathering a number
of high-quality papers which span a range of academic disciplines and concern diverse, topical issues
regarding ethics and information technologies. This year’s event also broke the previous record for
attending participants. Still, like in previous years, the conference was kept quite small to provide
participants opportunities to discuss their research in person and to form connections.
The conference programme consisted of two keynote speeches, thirteen paper presentations split
into six sessions, a poster presentation session, and an interactive session on technology ethics
education. The keynote speeches were held by John Danaher (University of Galway) and Anna
Metsäranta (Solita), respectively. Danaher’s keynote speech defended the idea that technologies and
technological advances can affect and change moral paradigms, providing illustrative historical
examples in support of this philosophical argument. Metsäranta’s keynote speech focused on
sustainable artificial intelligence (Al), shedding light on what sustainability means in the practice of
designing, developing, and using Al technologies and what kinds of challenges frequently arise.
Following this practical orientation, an interactive session on technology ethics education was
organized by Ville Vakkuri, Kai-Kristian Kemell, and Lauri Tuovinen, who planned the session
together with Tero Vartiainen. The session provided participants with the opportunity to discuss the
current state of technology ethics education, and to envision ways forward.
On the first day, paper presentations started with Joni-Roy Piispanen presenting a paper co-
authored with Tinja Myllyviita, Ville Vakkuri, and Rebekah Rousi which examined privacy and data
protection issues in Replika Al, a popular conversational Al application. The second session included
two presentations focusing on the ethical and political dimensions of Big Tech power. Jani Koskinen
presented his joint work with Salla Westerstrand, wherein they argue that platformisation colonises
the human lifeworld by implementing economic, administrative, and political power through
technology. Jaana Parviainen’s presentation cast light on Big Tech’s political and economic capturing
of Al ethics, in which Big Tech companies harness Al ethics research, and suppliers of that research,
to exercise political power. In the third session, the focus turned towards the theory and practice of
Al ethics. Kai-Kristian Kemell presented a paper co-authored with Jukka K. Nurminen and Ville
Vakkuri, which focuses on the real-life monitoring of machine learning systems’ compliance with
ethical principles. Lauri Tuovinen, presenting a paper written with Kimmo Halunen, demonstrated
how the common ethical principles of ‘security’ or ‘safety’ are still lacking in terms of proper
definition and operationalization, leading to corresponding ambiguity about what counts as an ‘Al
vulnerability’. The third presentation of the session presented the results of a systematic literature
review on ethical issues in large language models conducted by Atte Laakso, Kai-Kristian Kemell, and
Jukka K. Nurminen. The final session of the first day included presentations by Firuza Huseynova on
Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Technology Ethics (TETHICS2024), November 6-7, 2024, Tampere, Finland
Q thomas.olsson@tuni.fi (A. 1); otto.sahlgrcn@tuni.fi (A. 2); jaana.parviainen@tuni.fi (A. 3); salla.wcsterstrand@solita.fi (A. 4);
tuomas.harviainen@tuni.fi (A. 5); arto.laitinen@tuni.fi (A. 6); juho.rantala@tuni.fi (A. 7)
® 0000-0002-1106-2544 (A. 1); 0000-0001-7789-2009 (A. 2); 0000-0002-7838-592X (A. 3); 0000-0002-1441-8673 (A. 4); 0000-0002-6085-5663
(A, 5); 0000-0002-4514-7298 (A. 6); 0000-0002-6507-6749 (A. 7)
© 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
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Workshop ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings
human-AI augmentation and deskilling in the workplace, and by Dominik Schlienger on
misconceptions about the autonomy of Al systems, respectively.
The second day’s paper presentations started with a session on ethics in technology design.
Johanna Ahola-Launonen presented a critique of instrumentalist approaches to technology
evaluation and assessment, while Rebekah Rousi presented joint work with Jaana Leikas, Hannu
Vilpponen and Pertti Saariluoma which focused on ethical perspectives related to technology design
for the elderly. Aida Kalender discussed how community-based art organisations could be included
as collaborative partners in achieving design justice in smart city contexts, as examined in their paper
co-authored with Giovanni Sileno and Sennay Ghebreab. The final paper presentation session
included empirical studies on technology ethics in education, including a study on data privacy and
ethics in university education by Rebekah Rousi, Hanna-Kaisa Alanen and Anne Wilson, and a study
on how responsible Al perspectives could be included in technical education curricula by Rhoda
Abadia.
This year’s conference proceedings are the result of the hard work on part of the organizing
committee, the authors, and our international group of reviewers, but also our collective effort to not
only sustain but steadily improve TETHICS. Therefore, the organizing committee extends their
gratitude to the conference’s authors, reviewers, and participants for their assistance, participation,
and kind feedback. Special thanks go to our sponsors including Solita Group Ltd., the research DigiSus
research platform, the research project DigltO, and the Future Ethics research group, whose support
has been integral to ensure that TETHICS can be made affordable, especially for undergraduate and
PhD students.