Talk of the need for ‘responsible innovation’ is now commonplace. 'Data ethics’ and ‘AI ethics’ are new areas of research benefiting from intensive investment and growing attention from industry, public policymakers, and governments.  

But we must move beyond a view of ethics as an external constraint upon technical innovation, itself assumed to be morally ‘neutral.’

Technology is never morally neutral, as scholars in technology studies have known for many decades. All technologies embed value judgments about what is good for us to achieve, produce, accelerate, measure, repair, or build.

Value judgments are incorporated—consciously or implicitly—into technologies through human practices of design, development and deployment and through our choices about who technology will benefit.

Technology is also a source of power, and no significant increase of power within a community is morally neutral. Power alters the entitlements, obligations, and structures of relationships among peoples and nations. Power shapes whose voices are heard and whose rights are recognized. When power shifts, the flow of justice often shifts with it.

Just as technology is never morally neutral, morality in everyday life is reliant upon technique: social, political and material ways of effectively expressing our values in our actions, relationships, communities and institutions.

Technology and moral values are therefore interwoven. Together, they enable us to critically orient ourselves toward the design of possible, better futures. Cleaved apart, they leave us rudderless and lost.

Technology is thus much more than devices and gadgets. It's a vast range of tools and techniques we use to build our values, needs, desires, and hopes for the future into the material, social, and informational worlds we inhabit.

In turn, morality consists of the many cultural and philosophical techniques humans have developed for identifying social worlds and futures that would be good for us to inhabit, and that we would be wise to work together to build in ethical ways.

Good futures cannot be invented and sustained with technology or morality alone; they require technomoral expertise in concretely embedding ethical ways of life into our built worlds.

Today, wise technomoral innovation is more important than ever, as data-driven advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, data science, smart devices and algorithmic automation reshape our social, political, and physical environments and bring more of our public institutions, goods, services and relationships online. It is essential that these rapid changes to the shape of our world be guided by intellectually rigorous, creative and deeply integrated applications of technomoral wisdom.

Yet this path has been blocked by the artificial and socially corrosive divide between technical and moral knowledge, for centuries walled off from one another by perceived disciplinary boundaries between scientific, technical and humane modes of research and innovation.

Hampering our cultivation of technomoral wisdom further are the social barriers that have cut off the knowledge produced in elite academic institutions from the knowledge of how to live well and build well that is learned in other kinds of communities.

The long-enforced institutional separation of technical and moral wisdom has made it harder to predict and prevent unintended harms associated with new technologies, and harder to maintain, repair and improve the condition of our social institutions.

This false divide has imposed a heavy cost, one that now reveals itself to be compounded with interest: the cost is rapidly spreading distrust in experts and evidence; weakened public confidence in the legitimacy of our academic and political institutions, and loss of faith in the human ability and moral will to design and build wiser, more sustainable futures.

This is the challenge that our Centre strives to meet. Our students, staff, affiliates and programmes are charting new paths to technomoral wisdom by weaving together diverse strands of technical expertise in computing, data science, engineering and design with expertise in moral philosophy and applied ethics, policy, law, arts and social science.

In shedding new ethical light on the control and use of agricultural data, or investigating the impact of algorithmic allocation of health care on citizens agency, or revealing the values implicit in machine learning measurement and prediction, or designing responsibility frameworks to enable more trustworthy governance of autonomous systems --as well as many other projects like these – we at the Centre draw upon a vast array of domain expertise and cross-disciplinary skills within the EFI and University community, and our partners and communities across Scotland, the UK and the world.

Yet bringing disciplinary experts together is not enough. To permanently bridge these diverse communities of knowledge practice, we need to forge new and more inclusive technomoral research cultures, skills, vocabularies, methodologies, and incentives. These new cultures must enlarge and enrich our conception of who is an expert, of who has wisdom to share, to include the knowledge of those who live with, and without, technologies from perspectives excluded or devalued by prior research. These are the foundations needed to support wiser ways of envisioning and building futures than the past century has allowed.

New foundations take time to build; yet the task they support is increasingly urgent. We are grateful to the Baillie Gifford investment firm and to the University of Edinburgh for the initial ten-year commitment to the Centre and its mission. Our work has just begun; in keeping with EFI’s motto of patet omnibus, inherited from the Old Royal Infirmary which became the Centre’s home in 2024, we hold ourselves open to all who would join us in this labour.

Professor Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and AI
Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI)