WSIS Action Line C10 Ethical dimensions of the Information Society

Feinholz argues that ethics should guide technology from the earliest stages of design through deployment and regulation, not be appended at the end. She frames ethics as rooted in human rights, fundamental freedoms, and shared societal reflection about what technologies are for and what kind of society they should create.

She states that UNESCO wants ethics 'at the heart of the development of every technology' and says that human rights, fundamental freedoms, and collective discussion about the society people want must remain central . She also recalls the prior WSIS conclusion that ethical principles should guide the entire technology lifecycle from design and development to deployment and regulation, and later reiterates that ethics cannot be a last-minute addition but must cover the whole lifecycle .

Feinholz presents ethics as a disciplined collective exercise rather than an informal exchange of opinions. She says ethical assessment must systematically ask who needs a technology, what problem it solves, who benefits, who is affected, and include all relevant voices through a clear methodology.

She says ethics is a 'collective reflection' about who decides what society wants from AI and quantum technologies, and asks who needs a technology, why it is being developed, what problem it solves, and who it affects or benefits . She adds that this cannot be decided by one individual or one sector and requires all affected and benefiting voices around the table, using a specific methodology based on values and arguments rather than casual conversation .

Feinholz warns that ethics is often misused as a superficial label for compliance or checklist exercises. She insists that real ethics is about motivation, vision, and reflective judgement concerning values and social goals, not merely a list of principles.

She says the word ethics has been 'instrumentalized' and turned into a box-ticking exercise where stakeholders claim to be ethical simply by doing a few things . She then explains that ethics is about motivation, vision, reflection, philosophy, and collective deliberation, and that principles are only one part of ethics rather than its entirety .

Feinholz argues that UNESCO's approach is operational as well as normative. She says the recommendations explicitly cover the full lifecycle and are backed by concrete implementation tools, especially readiness assessments for member states.

In response to the question about ethics-by-design, she says UNESCO's perspective is 'exactly the opposite' of adding ethics as a layer at the end and explains that the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence covers the whole lifecycle and requires asking ethical questions at each stage . She also cites UNESCO's readiness assessment methodology, describing it as a complex and comprehensive tool for countries to diagnose how ready they are to deploy AI while embedding ethical questions throughout the process .

Feinholz argues that governance of new technologies should build on established institutional work rather than begin anew each time. She presents UNESCO's recommendations, advisory committees, and reports across AI, neurotechnology, bioethics, quantum computing, synthetic biology, and outer space as evidence of continuity that can inform future domains.

She introduces UNESCO's work by noting its AI ethics recommendation, the newly adopted recommendation on neurotechnologies, and the roles of the International Bioethics Committee and COMEST in producing reports across science and technology ethics . She specifically mentions reports on the ethics of quantum computing, outer space exploration and utilisation, and synthetic biology, arguing that these intersect with AI and make the session's themes central to UNESCO's mandate .

Feinholz says UNESCO is seeking practical ways to involve companies in ethics implementation. Her focus is on peer learning, self-disclosure of practices, and creating business-facing mechanisms that encourage more substantive ethical engagement rather than mere formal compliance.

She explains that, as part of implementing the recommendation, UNESCO has created networks of experts, civil society organisations, academics, and a business council intended to help businesses learn from one another and identify better practices . She also mentions a joint initiative with Thomson Reuters to develop a self-disclosure tool for practices, describing this as an attempt to move beyond instrumentalised compliance .

Feinholz argues that ethical governance must question the necessity and purpose of technology before assuming deployment is desirable. She links this to distributive justice, suggesting that in some contexts basic needs may be more urgent than advanced technological interventions.

She asks whether societies really need certain technologies in the first place and gives the health sector as an example, contrasting advanced medications with persistent problems such as lack of running water . She then says the first ethical questions should be who needs the technology, why it is being developed, what problem it solves, and who benefits or is affected .

Wolf Bauwens argues that some ethical concerns recur across emerging technologies, especially access and equity, but they do not arise with the same intensity in every domain. Governance therefore needs to be comparative and context-sensitive rather than assuming that privacy, access, or other issues map identically onto AI, quantum, and neurotechnology.

She says the biggest issue across technologies is access, with equity and distribution of access holding 'across the board', but she distinguishes their weight by saying access is a much bigger question for quantum computing than for AI . She also uses privacy as an example, arguing that it is more central for AI and neurotechnologies than for quantum computing because early quantum applications will not use personal data in the same way .

Wolf Bauwens argues that anticipatory governance depends on involving industry from the start rather than after policy frameworks are drafted. She says companies are already exercising de facto governance through how they develop and deploy technologies, so excluding them weakens practical governance.

After asking for a show of hands from industry participants and observing very few in the room, she argues that WSIS should be made more attractive to industry and notes from the COMEST quantum discussions that industry participation can be constructive rather than harmful . She further says that tech corporations are currently 'the ones who do the governance in practice' and calls for earlier multistakeholder engagement between industry, policy, and civil society .

Wolf Bauwens sees disagreement not as a failure of ethics but as a productive part of collective reasoning. She argues that this requires structured discourse and broad representation so that absent interests, including future generations and natural ecosystems, are not excluded.

Responding to the closing exchange on ethics, she invokes discursive ethics and says disagreement can be productive because it helps people find new solutions rather than forcing agreement . She adds that governance needs rules for how discussions are held and must ensure diverse participation, including next generations and even representation of the planet and natural ecosystems .

Wolf Bauwens argues that industry often operationalises ethics as compliance rather than reflection. This becomes especially weak in frontier fields where binding governance frameworks are underdeveloped, leaving ethics language detached from meaningful standards.

She cautions against over-reliance on ethics language in industry because, in her experience, ethics there is 'essentially compliance' . She then points out the irony that compliance is empty when there is nothing concrete to comply with, giving quantum and, to a degree, neurotechnologies as areas where governance frameworks remain thin or emergent .

Wolf Bauwens argues that institutional fragmentation leads to duplication and inefficient use of resources. She suggests that converging technologies would benefit from common principles developed jointly across institutions rather than multiple overlapping sets of ethics principles.

She says that across and beyond the UN system, institutions keep reproducing separate ethics principles and asks whether repeatedly drafting new sets, such as AI ethics principles, is a good use of time and energy . She proposes that institutions could work together from the start to produce a shared set of quantum or, preferably, converging future technologies ethics principles carrying multiple institutional logos rather than competing frameworks .

Wolf Bauwens argues that persuading companies may require speaking in the language of incentives. She suggests ethics may gain traction if linked to market logic through reputational risk, access to markets, reporting obligations, and public pressure.

In response to the youth question, she suggests the need for better 'return on investment' arguments for ethics and points to ESG reporting as an example of how corporate behaviour can be influenced when reporting and accountability expectations are established . She further says that ethics arguments often work through reputational risk and market access, citing the example of American firms losing European market share because Europeans care about data privacy, and argues these links need to be made more clearly .

Wolf Bauwens argues that technological convergence changes who needs to be involved in governance as much as it changes the substance of ethical concerns. Governance must therefore adapt to shifting constellations of stakeholders and to the particular issues that become salient in specific contexts.

She says that what is 'almost more important' than listing ethical issues is understanding how convergence changes the stakeholders and who should be in the room when these technologies are discussed . She also links practical action to making forums more interdisciplinary and ensuring exchange between industry and policymakers much earlier, which reflects her view that governance must adapt to changing stakeholder configurations .

Ahmed argues that quantum technologies do not emerge in isolation but extend existing digital and information society dynamics. She therefore recommends reusing lessons from AI governance, data governance, and digital ethics while remaining attentive to domain-specific nuances.

She says she envisions quantum technologies not as a vacuum but as 'a revolution and an evolution' of existing information society, digital economy, and ICT issues that WSIS has been addressing for two decades . She explicitly argues that advancing ethical analysis of quantum computing should leverage existing lessons from AI governance and digital ethics, and later repeats that policymakers should not reinvent the wheel because these are recurring issues with new nuances .

Ahmed argues that legitimate ethics frameworks for emerging technologies must reflect global diversity rather than regional or elite perspectives. She emphasises interoperability and inclusive participation from multiple stakeholders, especially from developing countries and underrepresented regions.

She argues that UNESCO's AI ethics framework is distinctive because it was agreed by over 100 member states and developed through an open multistakeholder process involving organisations from around the world . She then says future frameworks for quantum technologies should also be globally inclusive and interoperable, and not based mainly on European worldviews of ethics .

Ahmed contrasts UNESCO's framework with professional or industry codes by stressing its broader legitimacy and inclusiveness. Her point is that a globally negotiated framework carries a different political and ethical weight from narrower expert-led charters.

She states that a key difference of UNESCO's AI ethics framework is that it was ratified and agreed by over 100 member states . She contrasts this with industry charters such as ACM, arguing that many engineers from developing countries were likely not involved in those processes, whereas UNESCO's framework was built through an open multistakeholder process with participants from different organisations worldwide .

Ahmed argues that many governance debates around quantum technologies repeat long-standing digital governance concerns. She suggests policymakers should recognise the continuity of issues such as access, infrastructure, accountability, and distribution rather than treat each technological wave as entirely novel.

She says that issues such as access, equity, local applicability, and distribution of digital dividends are shaped by governance, regulation, and standards, and that these are not new for those who have worked on the digital economy and information society . She also points to recurring narratives like ICT for development, AI for good, and now quantum for good, arguing that despite the changing labels the underlying fundamentals remain the same .

Ahmed argues against one-size-fits-all ethics frameworks and says governance should be tailored to use case, sector, and infrastructure context. Different applications of quantum technologies raise different data, regulatory, and ethical concerns, so existing sector expertise must be brought in.

She explicitly advises against a blanket approach and says a healthcare application of quantum sensing differs from an industrial Internet of Things application because the data, infrastructure, and existing regulations and codes of ethics differ across sectors . She also cites finance and military applications in relation to post-quantum cryptography, and discusses cloud-based access to quantum computing as raising geopolitical and infrastructure ethics issues .

Bazargan argues that ethics should be embedded from the beginning of the technology lifecycle through ethics-by-design. He contrasts this with what he sees as a weaker model in which ethics is layered on at the end after core design choices are already made.

He points to professional associations such as ACM and IEEE, saying they have codes of ethics, enforcement mechanisms, and talk about ethics by design . He also cites IBM's framework, describing it as embedding ethics from the start of user research throughout the full cycle, and contrasts that with his perception that UNESCO's work appears more like a layer added at the end .

Bazargan argues that governance debates should make greater use of the ethics work already done by professional associations. He presents ACM, IEEE, and IBM as examples of communities and organisations that have developed practical models for embedding ethics in technical practice.

He says that ACM and IEEE have codes of ethics and enforcement, and that they explicitly discuss ethics by design . He further recommends the ACM code as 'one of the best and brightest' ethics codes available and refers listeners to the ACM ethics website as a concrete resource .

Bazargan argues that ethics need not remain abstract because professional bodies have already shown that enforceable ethical frameworks can exist. His point is that these mechanisms should shape how technologies are actually developed, not merely how they are discussed.

He highlights that ACM and IEEE not only have ethics codes but also enforcement mechanisms, using them as proof that implementation is possible . He also points to IBM's 'full framework for ethics by design', which he says embeds ethics across the whole development cycle rather than adding it afterwards .

Engelson argues that ethics cannot be reduced to comfortable slogans, technical rules, or simple consensus. He presents it as a difficult and often painful process of contestation in which disagreement is inevitable and any common ground is hard won.

He says ethics is a 'deep deep lengthy discussion' and warns that opening that discussion is risky because it quickly exposes disagreement across journalism, war, institutions, and religion . He concludes that ethics is a personal matter requiring people to 'pay for' it inwardly, and that trying to build something beyond rules and compliance is a difficult and painful path .

Engelson argues that once ethics hardens into formal rule-following it risks becoming conformism rather than moral judgement. In his view, bureaucratic labelling of rules as ethics can dilute the deeper, contested, and personal character of ethical reflection.

He says that when ethical discussion turns into rules, in his vocabulary it becomes 'conform', and that conformism is an 'archenemy of ethics' . He also criticises the tendency to rename ordinary rules, compliance, and regulation as ethics, arguing that the world will not improve merely by calling them ethical .

Kaminski argues that youth inclusion is essential because governance decisions made now will shape the world future generations inherit. She frames youth participation as a matter of legitimacy and intergenerational justice within multistakeholder governance.

She says that youth should always be included in discussions on ethics because young people are the ones who will live in the world governed by the rules being created today .

Kaminski's intervention emphasises that multistakeholder governance is incomplete without youth. She argues that youth should not be occasional participants but a consistent part of rooms where ethical and governance decisions are made.

She links her point directly to multistakeholder governance, saying it is 'super important' to always have youth included in rooms whenever ethics is being discussed because they will live with the resulting rules .

Kaminski frames corporate incentives as a central governance problem. She asks how frameworks and guidelines can persuade large technology firms that acting ethically matters to their own interests rather than merely satisfying external pressure from governments or international organisations.

She asks how, despite many frameworks and ethical reflections, policymakers can ensure that 'tech giants in Silicon Valley' have an interest in thinking and acting ethically .