Steven Umbrello
Biographic Data
| ID | 236693 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steven Umbrello |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steven |
| FAMILY NAME | Umbrello |
| SIGNATURE | UMBRELLO S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Turin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2594-6313 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Ethical playgrounds: Unveiling a serious game for technology ethics within the TechEthos project
In this article, we present the TechEthos Game: Ages of Technology Impacts , a serious game rooted in the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project TechEthos. This game is built to support public reflection and perspectives on the social and ethical issues of new and emerging technologies, and to surface and collect participants’ awareness, attitudes, and values towards specific technology families. The TechEthos Game offers an immersive exploration of the …
Quantum Security Threat Discovery: A Value Sensitive Design Approach to Discovering Security Risks of Quantum Sensing at the Port of Moerdijk
Reframing Deception for Human-Centered AI
Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua, Toward an Anthropology of Screens: Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting reviewed by Steven Umbrello
In an era where digital screens are as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, Toward an Anthropology of Screens by Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua offers a seminal exploration into screens' crucial functions and profound impact on human culture.This scholarly work dissects the screen's evolution, anthropological significance and philosophical implications, offering an enlightening narrative on our mediated reality.The book establishes its foundation…
Emotions and Automation in a High-Tech Workplace: A Commentary
In a recent article, Madelaine Ley evaluates the future of work, specifically robotised workplaces, via the lens of care ethics. Like many proponents of care ethics, Ley draws on the approach and its emphasis on relationality to understand ethical action necessary for worker wellbeing. Her paper aims to fill a research gap by shifting away from the traditional contexts in which care ethics is employed, i.e., health and care contexts and instead a…
Modifying the Environment or Human Nature? What is the Right Choice for Space Travel and Mars Colonisation
As space travel and intentions to colonise other planets are becoming the norm in public debate and scholarship, we must also confront the technical and survival challenges that emerge from these hostile environments. This paper aims to evaluate the various arguments proposed to meet the challenges of human space travel and extraterrestrial planetary colonisation. In particular, two primary solutions have been present in the literature as the mos…
From speculation to reality: Enhancing anticipatory ethics for emerging technologies (ATE) in practice
Various approaches have emerged over the last several decades to meet the challenges and complexities of anticipating and responding to the potential impacts of emerging technologies. Although many of the existing approaches share similarities, they each have shortfalls. This paper takes as the object of its study Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies (ATE) to technology assessment, given that it was formatted to address many of the priva…
The Intersection of Bernard Lonergan's Critical Realism, the Common Good, and Artificial Intelligence in Modern Religious Practices
Artificial intelligence (AI) profoundly influences a number of societal structures today, including religious dynamics. Using Bernard Lonergan's critical realism as a lens, this article investigates the intersections of AI and religious traditions in their shared pursuit of the common good. Beginning with Lonergan's principle that humans construct their understanding through cognitive processes, we examine how AI-mediated realities align with or …
Values for a Post-Pandemic Future
This open access book explores how ethically designed technologies have a unique role to play in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis.
Responsible nudging for social good: New healthcare skills for AI-driven digital personal assistants
Traditional medical practices and relationships are changing given the widespread adoption of AI-driven technologies across the various domains of health and healthcare. In many cases, these new technologies are not specific to the field of healthcare. Still, they are existent, ubiquitous, and commercially available systems upskilled to integrate these novel care practices. Given the widespread adoption, coupled with the dramatic changes in pract…
Designing AI for Explainability and Verifiability: A Value Sensitive Design Approach to Avoid Artificial Stupidity in Autonomous Vehicles
One of the primary, if not most critical, difficulties in the design and implementation of autonomous systems is the black-boxed nature of the decision-making structures and logical pathways. How human values are embodied and actualised in situ may ultimately prove to be harmful if not outright recalcitrant. For this reason, the values of stakeholders become of particular significance given the risks posed by opaque structures of intelligent agen…
Prometheus
Prometheus
Prometheus
Prometheus
The Ecological Turn in Design: Adopting a Posthumanist Ethics to Inform Value Sensitive Design
Design for Values (DfV) philosophies are a series of design approaches that aim to incorporate human values into the early phases of technological design to direct innovation into beneficial outcomes. The difficulty and necessity of directing advantageous futures for transformative technologies through the application and adoption of value-based design approaches are apparent. However, questions of whose values to design are of critical importanc…
Coupling levels of abstraction in understanding meaningful human control of autonomous weapons: A two-tiered approach
The international debate on the ethics and legality of autonomous weapon systems (AWS), along with the call for a ban, primarily focus on the nebulous concept of fully autonomous AWS. These are AWS capable of target selection and engagement absent human supervision or control. This paper argues that such a conception of autonomy is divorced from both military planning and decision-making operations; it also ignores the design requirements that go…
Reckoning with assessment: Can we responsibly innovate
Can humans dream of electric sheep: James M. MacFarlane: Transhumanism as a new social movement: the techno-centred imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 239pp, € 72,79 HB
Prometheus
Co-Design of a Trustworthy AI System in Healthcare: Deep Learning Based Skin Lesion Classifier
This paper documents how an ethically aligned co-design methodology ensures trustworthiness in the early design phase of an artificial intelligence (AI) system component for healthcare. The system explains decisions made by deep learning networks analyzing images of skin lesions. The co-design of trustworthy AI developed here used a holistic approach rather than a static ethical checklist and required a multidisciplinary team of experts working w…
The future of war: Could lethal autonomous weapons make conflict more ethical
Fragile Umanità
Leonardo Caffo, the author of numerous books, is an Italian essayist and philosopher based at the Polytechnic of Turin, where he currently teaches ontology of design in the Faculty of Architecture. His primary research is in animal studies, and as such, it is no wonder that Caffo’s latest literary venture is into posthumanism.Fragile Umanità (literally “Fragile Humanity”), like Caffo’s other works, is written entirely in Italian with no English t…
Humankind: Solidarity with nonhuman people
This book by Timothy Morton is a poetic tour de force that is both academically and philosophically rigorous. It may prove to be a manifesto of ‘ecocommunism’. As is typical of Morton's work, the p
The moral psychology of value sensitive design: The methodological issues of moral intuitions for responsible innovation
This paper argues that although moral intuitions are insufficient for making judgments on new technological innovations, they maintain great utility for informing responsible innovation. To do this, this paper employs the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology as an illustrative example of how stakeholder values can be better distilled to inform responsible innovation. Further, it is argued that moral intuitions are necessary for determining st…
From speculation to reality: Enhancing anticipatory ethics for emerging technologies (ATE) in practice
Various approaches have emerged over the last several decades to meet the challenges and complexities of anticipating and responding to the potential impacts of emerging technologies. Although many of the existing approaches share similarities, they each have shortfalls. This paper takes as the object of its study Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies (ATE) to technology assessment, given that it was formatted to address many of the priva…
The Intersection of Bernard Lonergan's Critical Realism, the Common Good, and Artificial Intelligence in Modern Religious Practices
Artificial intelligence (AI) profoundly influences a number of societal structures today, including religious dynamics. Using Bernard Lonergan's critical realism as a lens, this article investigates the intersections of AI and religious traditions in their shared pursuit of the common good. Beginning with Lonergan's principle that humans construct their understanding through cognitive processes, we examine how AI-mediated realities align with or …
Evaluating future nanotechnology: The net societal impacts of atomically precise manufacturing
Modifying the Environment or Human Nature? What is the Right Choice for Space Travel and Mars Colonisation
As space travel and intentions to colonise other planets are becoming the norm in public debate and scholarship, we must also confront the technical and survival challenges that emerge from these hostile environments. This paper aims to evaluate the various arguments proposed to meet the challenges of human space travel and extraterrestrial planetary colonisation. In particular, two primary solutions have been present in the literature as the mos…
Designing in ethics
The disciplines that comprise contemporary science and technology studies have long argued that technologies are value laden and able to affect, translate and mediate human interactions. Technology
Humankind: Solidarity with nonhuman people
This book by Timothy Morton is a poetic tour de force that is both academically and philosophically rigorous. It may prove to be a manifesto of ‘ecocommunism’. As is typical of Morton's work, the p
The moral psychology of value sensitive design: The methodological issues of moral intuitions for responsible innovation
This paper argues that although moral intuitions are insufficient for making judgments on new technological innovations, they maintain great utility for informing responsible innovation. To do this, this paper employs the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology as an illustrative example of how stakeholder values can be better distilled to inform responsible innovation. Further, it is argued that moral intuitions are necessary for determining st…
Evaluating future nanotechnology: The net societal impacts of atomically precise manufacturing
A Theory of Everything
Book review: A Theory of Everything
Fragile Umanità
Leonardo Caffo, the author of numerous books, is an Italian essayist and philosopher based at the Polytechnic of Turin, where he currently teaches ontology of design in the Faculty of Architecture. His primary research is in animal studies, and as such, it is no wonder that Caffo’s latest literary venture is into posthumanism.Fragile Umanità (literally “Fragile Humanity”), like Caffo’s other works, is written entirely in Italian with no English t…
The future of war: Could lethal autonomous weapons make conflict more ethical
The Ecological Turn in Design: Adopting a Posthumanist Ethics to Inform Value Sensitive Design
Design for Values (DfV) philosophies are a series of design approaches that aim to incorporate human values into the early phases of technological design to direct innovation into beneficial outcomes. The difficulty and necessity of directing advantageous futures for transformative technologies through the application and adoption of value-based design approaches are apparent. However, questions of whose values to design are of critical importanc…
Coupling levels of abstraction in understanding meaningful human control of autonomous weapons: A two-tiered approach
The international debate on the ethics and legality of autonomous weapon systems (AWS), along with the call for a ban, primarily focus on the nebulous concept of fully autonomous AWS. These are AWS capable of target selection and engagement absent human supervision or control. This paper argues that such a conception of autonomy is divorced from both military planning and decision-making operations; it also ignores the design requirements that go…
Reckoning with assessment: Can we responsibly innovate
Can humans dream of electric sheep: James M. MacFarlane: Transhumanism as a new social movement: the techno-centred imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 239pp, € 72,79 HB
Prometheus
Co-Design of a Trustworthy AI System in Healthcare: Deep Learning Based Skin Lesion Classifier
This paper documents how an ethically aligned co-design methodology ensures trustworthiness in the early design phase of an artificial intelligence (AI) system component for healthcare. The system explains decisions made by deep learning networks analyzing images of skin lesions. The co-design of trustworthy AI developed here used a holistic approach rather than a static ethical checklist and required a multidisciplinary team of experts working w…
Values for a Post-Pandemic Future
This open access book explores how ethically designed technologies have a unique role to play in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis.
Responsible nudging for social good: New healthcare skills for AI-driven digital personal assistants
Traditional medical practices and relationships are changing given the widespread adoption of AI-driven technologies across the various domains of health and healthcare. In many cases, these new technologies are not specific to the field of healthcare. Still, they are existent, ubiquitous, and commercially available systems upskilled to integrate these novel care practices. Given the widespread adoption, coupled with the dramatic changes in pract…
Designing AI for Explainability and Verifiability: A Value Sensitive Design Approach to Avoid Artificial Stupidity in Autonomous Vehicles
One of the primary, if not most critical, difficulties in the design and implementation of autonomous systems is the black-boxed nature of the decision-making structures and logical pathways. How human values are embodied and actualised in situ may ultimately prove to be harmful if not outright recalcitrant. For this reason, the values of stakeholders become of particular significance given the risks posed by opaque structures of intelligent agen…
Prometheus
Prometheus
Prometheus
Prometheus
Emotions and Automation in a High-Tech Workplace: A Commentary
In a recent article, Madelaine Ley evaluates the future of work, specifically robotised workplaces, via the lens of care ethics. Like many proponents of care ethics, Ley draws on the approach and its emphasis on relationality to understand ethical action necessary for worker wellbeing. Her paper aims to fill a research gap by shifting away from the traditional contexts in which care ethics is employed, i.e., health and care contexts and instead a…
Modifying the Environment or Human Nature? What is the Right Choice for Space Travel and Mars Colonisation
As space travel and intentions to colonise other planets are becoming the norm in public debate and scholarship, we must also confront the technical and survival challenges that emerge from these hostile environments. This paper aims to evaluate the various arguments proposed to meet the challenges of human space travel and extraterrestrial planetary colonisation. In particular, two primary solutions have been present in the literature as the mos…
From speculation to reality: Enhancing anticipatory ethics for emerging technologies (ATE) in practice
Various approaches have emerged over the last several decades to meet the challenges and complexities of anticipating and responding to the potential impacts of emerging technologies. Although many of the existing approaches share similarities, they each have shortfalls. This paper takes as the object of its study Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies (ATE) to technology assessment, given that it was formatted to address many of the priva…
The Intersection of Bernard Lonergan's Critical Realism, the Common Good, and Artificial Intelligence in Modern Religious Practices
Artificial intelligence (AI) profoundly influences a number of societal structures today, including religious dynamics. Using Bernard Lonergan's critical realism as a lens, this article investigates the intersections of AI and religious traditions in their shared pursuit of the common good. Beginning with Lonergan's principle that humans construct their understanding through cognitive processes, we examine how AI-mediated realities align with or …
Reframing Deception for Human-Centered AI
Computer Science (18 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Engineering (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (9 works) · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Engineering ethics (8 works) · Law (7 works)