Midi de la recherche SIO avec Emmanuelle Vaast
Date 24 janvier 2025
Heure 12h30 à 14h
Lieu En ligne seulement
Événement gratuit
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Le Département de systèmes d’information organisationnels vous invite à une présentation de la professeure Emmanuelle Vaast sur sa recherche Experiencing and addressing moral ambivalence when developing digital technology: Insights from Artificial Intelligence developers.
La présentation se déroulera en anglais.
Inscription obligatoire avant le 24 janvier.
Résumé
Experiencing and addressing moral ambivalence when developing digital technology: Insights from Artificial Intelligence developers
Technology developers are key to the development of digital technology. Technology development work is however morally ambivalent because deciding what to do and not to do is difficult and carries complicated implications, which are often in contradiction. Developers might be faced with reasonable arguments that lead to opposing courses of action. How do technology developers experience and address the moral ambivalence of their work? To answer this question, this study builds on insights on morality and digital technology development and on the concept of moral ambivalence. It then relies upon a qualitative study of Artificial Intelligence (AI) developers. Two rounds of semi-structured interviews (55 in 2020 and 43 in 2023) reveal how AI developers experienced moral ambivalence in their work and what they did to address it. The study illuminates distinct experiences of moral ambivalence (limited, moderate, and existential) associated with various practices (e.g., educating users or other developers, voicing concerns, choosing what to work and not work on). This study answers calls to consider morality in technology development by emphasizing the importance of moral ambivalence to understand how technology developers work. It adds to scholarship by explaining how the experiences of moral ambivalence of technology developers are diverse and change over time and by highlighting how addressing moral ambivalence involves moral distancing (focusing on one’s tasks), moral professionalizing (working at making the context more conducive to moral behavior), or moral personalizing (questioning one’s personal situation to act morally).
