Ethics as Technology: AI Ethics as Technologies of Governance and the Case for STS
TL;DR
This paper analyzes five influential documents representing the broad field of AI ethics as a ‘sociotechnical imaginary’: a collectively held, institutionalized, and publicly performed vision of the future and outlines alternative pathways toward historically, geographically, and politically situated forms of ethics.
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a central focus of ethical deliberation in reports, guidelines, and official statements issued by technology companies, governments, and international organizations. This paper analyzes five influential documents representing the broad field of AI ethics as a ‘sociotechnical imaginary’: a collectively held, institutionalized, and publicly performed vision of the future. It argues that this imaginary transforms ethics into a technology of governance through which governments, international organizations, and corporations present AI as an inevitable, controllable, and desirable future. The paper critically examines the limitations of this approach, particularly its claims to universality, which treat both AI and ethics as abstract, cultureless objects detached from time and place. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and philosophy, the paper outlines alternative pathways toward historically, geographically, and politically situated forms of ethics, in which technological futures remain collective, contested, and open rather than confined to trajectories presented as inevitable.