Suchergebnisse

This volume summarizes the ethical, social and cultural contexts of interfacing brains and computers. It is intended for the interdisciplinary community of BCI stakeholders. Insofar, engineers, neuroscientists, psychologists, physicians, care-givers and also users and their relatives are concerned. For about the last twenty years brain-computer-interfaces (BCIs) have been investigated with increasing intensity and have in principle shown their potential to be useful tools in diagnostics, rehabilitation and assistive technology. The central promise of BCI technology is enabling severely impaired people in mobility, grasping, communication, and entertainment. Successful applications are for instance communication devices enabling locked-in patients in staying in contact with their environment, or prostheses enabling paralysed people in reaching and grasping. In addition to this, it serves as an introduction to the whole field of BCI for any interested reader.

In this article, we will reflect on the methodologies of ethical technology assessment (TA cf. Grunwald 2010), accompanying research projects focusing on tactile internet solutions with humans in the loop (TaHIL). We outline how TA might be oriented towards a set of prima facie values (Beauchamp & Childress, 2013) that address possible implications and consequences of technology use. This framework shall be applied to the development of tactile Internet technology treating such technology as a special kind of cyber-physical system. Because the impact of technical developments and their unintended consequences cannot be anticipated from the outset, it is all the more important to address ethically relevant aspects right from the start in research projects that develop TaHIL-applications.:1. Aim of the basic research in Technology Assessment 2. TA as an integrative part of the iterative research approach 3. Responsible Research and Innovation: three dimensional Path Developments 4. Dilemmata in the democratization of skills 5. Work systems within the framework of TaHIL technologies 6. Implementation process 7. Conclusion