Transform to Empower!



Technology should serve empowerment. Let me help you to implement an ethical AI development and maintenance cycle. This cycle will enable continuous harmonisation of ethics; a search for common ground. The approach is known as Capability Sensitive Design.








Begin the virtuous cycle of empowerment!





Conceptual Investigation


We begin the first cycle with a workshop. Think of the workshop as step zero in the first cycle; nothing will be built yet and it is purely conceptual. In this workshop we begin by asking questions:

  1. What are the capabilities and functionings that are relevant in the design context?

  2. Who are your stakeholders?

    • Direct Stakeholders

    • Indirect Stakeholders

  3. What are the relevant conversion factors at play for your stakeholders?


In later cycles we revisit these questions in light of empirical evidence, coming from the next two steps.




Technical Investigation


The technical investigation is where we map out what technical solutions we will use to enable the capabilities that you want to provide to your stakeholders and that we have identified in the conceptual investigation. Questions we ask here are:

  1. What tangible design requirements should be derived?

  2. What existing services and platforms should be used to build or further develop the system?

  3. What are the budget and time requirements?


We then build the system that we mapped out in the technical investigation and so the work product of the technical investigation is a statement of work.






Empirical Investigation


The empirical investigation, even within the first cycle, is dependent on the completion of the work that was mapped out in the technical investigation. It can be seen as the data science and gamification part of the process. Here, we map out how we will receive feedback from your stakeholders. Questions we ask here are:

  1. How can direct and indirect stakeholders give us feedback?

  2. How do we use data to test our hypotheses from the conceptual stage?

  3. How do we measure how empowering our algorithms are in the wild?

The empirical investigation completes the cycle in that it allows for literal feedback and it enables subsequent cycles of improvement, growth and empowerment.











What ethic is embodied in your technology?








Technology determines how power is exercised in society. It therefore mediates how society evolves. Moreover, new possibilities in fields such as artificial intelligence, genome editing, and geoengineering not only redistribute power--these technologies can and will change what it means to be human.

Watch my TEDx talk on "becoming collectively intelligent", below:

Collective Intelligence.