Digital Ethics Summit 2019 - Making Progress?

19 Dec 2019 02:37 PM

Making progress and facing up to difficult questions ahead.

On Wednesday 11 December, techUK held its third annual Digital Ethics Summit to assess the progress that’s been made over the last 12 months to operationalise ethical principles and turn them into real action that delivers genuine benefits to people’s everyday lives.

This event was organised by techUK in partnership with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Digital Catapult, Open Data Institute, Royal Society, University of Oxford’s Digital Ethics Lab, Wellcome, the Royal Statistical Society, British Academy, Ada Lovelace Institute, The Alan Turing Institute and The Institute for Ethical AI in Education. It was sponsored by Microsoft, Intel, Visa, Splunk and QuantumBlack.

Kicking off the Summit Antony Walker, Deputy CEO at techUK, highlighted that the day was all about asking whether the focus on digital ethics is giving us the tools we need to ensure safe and responsible innovation in powerful new technologies.

In her opening address, reflecting on the year since the last Summit, Elizabeth Denham, Information Commissioner at the ICO highlighted the progress that is being made but stressed that there are some tough challenging questions ahead. She raised three key questions to frame the day’s discussion: How are we as a digital community monitoring if a digital underclass is forming? Could data ethics provide a common language for greater global convergence? And finally, are there enough voices in the data ethics conversation?

Click here for the full press release