Articles

This page aggregates articles published before, during, and after the conference The Technoprogressive Opportunity: The future of ethics and emerging technologies.

The conference organisers invite people interested in the themes of the event to submit short articles to be published online on these pages.

These articles:

  • Can address any of the themes of The Technoprogressive Opportunity
  • Should contain between 1,000 and 6,000 words (not counting any references included)
  • Can contains graphics in addition to the textual content
  • Can include content reviewed or enhanced by AIs, but the person submitting the article mut accept responsibility for it.

Articles published

Building a Spiral of Trust for Emerging Technologies – by David W. Wood

Abstract:

The functionality of technology has leapt ahead of the trustworthiness of the institutions governing it. Emerging technologies could enable unprecedented advances in health, knowledge, and human flourishing. They could also intensify inequality, concentrate power, destabilise societies, or create catastrophic risks. Yet our mechanisms for deciding what should be developed, deployed, limited, delayed, or prohibited remain dangerously inadequate.

How, then, should these decisions be made? For whom, by whom, through what processes, and for what purposes?

This essay proposes a “spiral of trust” as a framework for answering these questions. Rather than placing blind confidence in experts, elected politicians, markets, public opinion, or advanced AI systems, it argues for trust that is warranted, bounded, contestable, and revisable. Starting from limited foundations that deserve confidence, societies could use relatively trusted people, procedures, institutions, and technologies to evaluate more capable systems, progressively expanding the scope of trustworthy collective decision-making where justified by evidence.

The essay develops a technoprogressive vision in which emerging technologies are directed toward diverse forms of sustainable flourishing for all, supported by inclusive but appropriately coordinated participation and collaborative information systems. It proposes candidate principles covering moral standing and flourishing, epistemic integrity, and power, governance, and risk. It also confronts unresolved challenges involving entrenched power, systemic instability, hostile media ecosystems, human irrationality, democratic legitimacy, expertise, and the difficult bootstrap problem of establishing the first foundations of warranted trust.