Book Review: Emerging Pervasive Information and Communication Technologies (PICT)

Abstract

For the reader, this arrangement provides plenty of actual or near-term scenarios and applications of pervasive (some would say ‘ubiquitous’) information and communication technology (PICT), before the moral rules and principles that could be applied to them are directly considered. But make no mistake about it: the consideration of normative issues is abundant in the earlier chapters, and this is a real strength of the book. The less philosophically-inclined reader could easily benefit from the consideration of the applications, and yet reject the later theoretical analyses. Likewise, the two concluding theoretical essays could stand alone as contributions to the ethics of IT. But the essays as a group are best read as an arranged narrative—one that considers the ethical dimensions of technologies, takes account of points of intersection through the book, and then elicits the rules and principles to address these dimensions. Pimple’s introductory first chapter gives a brief overview of each subsequent essay, and is a useful guide for the reader who may want to skim or skip around based on particular interests. In the introduction, he describes the uniting framework for the ethical inquiries to come as one of “anticipatory ethics”—which contains an expectation that work in ethics can influence emerging technologies and the socio-technical systems in which they are embedded. This is a laudable goal, but one wonders immediately if a family of technologies that is both emerging and pervasive—and overwhelmingly favored by world trends in global trade, consumerism, and the rhetoric of efficiency—can really be altered, significantly, by scholarship on ethics. In essence, the problem is that, by the