Category: 4.1 Society (General)

  • A simple fun example of how a computer reads intent wrong

    A simple fun example of how a computer reads intent wrong

    I read an article about India and wanted to know how much money “2 lakh” is in Euro. The search engine responded as follows:

  • Funding universal basic income with rent from your data

    Funding universal basic income with rent from your data

    A person’s universal basic income (UBI) is income that this person is guaranteed to receive whatever their living circumstances. The income should allow the person to have a humane life, i.e. pay for food and housing, healthcare and so forth. One concern is that UBI may be too costly. Most assume that UBI will paid…

  • Digital Sovereignty for Germany?

    Digital Sovereignty for Germany?

    Last week the German government published a commissioned study on how it depends on software and services vendors (local copy). The day after the publication, Cathrin Schaer of ZDnet called to ask for my thoughts on the study and digital sovereignty for Germany: Is it even possible? Cathrin’s resulting article picked up some of our…

  • Position Statement on the Use of ML / KI Techniques in Software Engineering For the adesso Hochschulbeirat

    Position Statement on the Use of ML / KI Techniques in Software Engineering For the adesso Hochschulbeirat

    I just submitted the following short position statement on how to work with ML / KI techniques in software engineering. This is a statement on using such techniques for the engineering of software, not in the software itself, which is a (not completely, but mostly) separate issue. ML / KI techniques can be use in…

  • The Argument For a Moral Machine in Autonomous Driving

    The Argument For a Moral Machine in Autonomous Driving

    I have a strong aversion against letting people drag their feet from being responsible for their actions. I feel particularly strongly about this when delegating work to machines, which are not able to act using an appropriate moral value system. Starting a car and letting an autonomous driving unit take over is one such example:…

  • The Argument Against a Moral Machine in Autonomous Driving

    The Argument Against a Moral Machine in Autonomous Driving

    Ever since autonomous driving became a hot topic, I’ve tried to sell to our automotive industry partners the idea of a project to build a moral machine in autonomous driving. My definition of a moral machine (there are others) is: A moral machine (for autonomous driving) is a machine that encodes the driver’s moral value…