Journal of responsible technology最新文献

{"title":"Frontiers of thanabots as DeathTech: Transgressive acts, politics and activism, and emerging professions","authors":"Joshua Hurtado Hurtado","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100176","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100176","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Digital replicas of the dead, often called thanabots, are increasingly used for purposes beyond dealing with grief. The advent of generative artificial intelligence technologies and the continued attempts by technology companies to digitally recreate the dead demand increasing awareness of the potential benefits and risks of thanabots. In this article, I ask: in what ways can thanabots be used beyond dealing with grief? And how can ethical and governance principles help orient their responsible use? Inspired by a Futures Studies approach and drawing on data from nine semi-structured interviews, I describe three frontiers of thanabots as DeathTech that show novel ways in which people can engage with thanabots beyond a focus on grief. These frontiers are transgressive acts, politics and activism, and emerging professions. I discuss the ethical and social significance of the three frontiers and propose several principles to inform the development of ethical and governance frameworks of this technology. Though mostly speculative, the three frontiers and the corresponding principles contribute to ongoing conversations on the responsible development of DeathTech.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148178528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Erratum to ‘What's left of responsible innovation after Gaza? Ecocide, epistemicide, and genocide in occupied Palestine’ [Journal of Responsible Technology Volume 23, September 2025, 100132]","authors":"Mario Pansera","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2025.100146","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2025.100146","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100146"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148553980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Opaque procurement: How transparency deficits compromise democratic digital sovereignty","authors":"Bart Anthony Kamphorst ,&nbsp;Sofie de Wilde de Ligny ,&nbsp;Fabian Ferrari ,&nbsp;Mirko Tobias Schäfer","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100178","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100178","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>While digital sovereignty has quickly become a European policy mantra, few public institutions in Europe possess a clear view of their actual technological dependencies on proprietary infrastructure and non-European providers of data and AI products and services. This lack of insight not only risks turning calls for more sovereignty into hollow slogans but also frustrates the responsible governance of digital technologies. This article argues that opaque procurement practices contribute to the persistence of the problem. Without knowing what is bought, from whom, and under what terms, public institutions are restricted in exercising effective control and cannot adequately plan for and use suitable alternatives. Moreover, without meaningful mechanisms of transparency about procurement, researchers, critical members of the public, and journalists are denied access to necessary resources for democratic contestation and holding public institutions accountable. Building on previous research in the Netherlands, the article uses the Dutch public sector as a case study to show how an opaque procurement ecosystem may undermine democratic digital sovereignty ambitions. To improve the situation, the article outlines strategies for making the procurement of data and AI products and services more transparent.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148230721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Principles of consent and non-addiction in AI grief bots","authors":"Kwan Yiu Cheng","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100177","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100177","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article proposes that the principles of consent and non-addiction are central to the responsible and safe use of AI grief bots. The article begins by answering the questions of what a grief bot is, how grief bots operate and how grief bot businesses generate profit. It sets out the practical categories of grief bots and explains how AI grief bots fit within the concepts of death technology and grief technology. First, the article suggests that AI grief bots must operate in accordance with the principle of consent. This requires consent to the creation, use and deletion of the AI grief bot, as well as consent to the use of the deceased’s portrait rights and personal information, so that the applications operate responsibly towards the deceased and those affected by their use. Second, the article advances the principle of non-addiction in relation to AI grief bots. This principle requires that grief bots are implemented with safeguards so that they do not produce unhealthy emotional dependency or compulsive attachment. It requires faithful use of input data, interventions such as consistent warnings and, more generally, clear labelling. Closely connected to non-addiction is the principle of non-manipulation, which requires that the system does not actively encourage excessive reliance or compulsive use that interferes with healthy grieving and ordinary daily life. Finally, particular concerns arise regarding the capacity of children to provide informed consent in relation to grief bots, and additional safeguards are therefore necessary, including parental or guardian accompaniment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148178527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A care-centred approach for responsible design and use of AI-enabled digital technologies for dying and death","authors":"Richard Green","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100174","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100174","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) powered technologies, such as chatbots and ambient intelligence technologies, into processes of dying and death introduces both new opportunities and ethical challenges. These technologies have the potential to support communication between those who are dying and those around them in a range a ways, particularly for important work in anticipatory and advance care planning, and bereavement processes. Yet, their capacity to simulate empathy, capture intimate conversations, and persist beyond death raises profound questions about autonomy, authenticity, consent, and the moral boundaries of digital companionship. This conceptual paper examines the ethical considerations of deploying some of these technologies in PEOLC, drawing on principles of feminist ethics of care and responsible research and innovation to explore tensions between technological promise and human vulnerability. From this a care-centred approach to governance of dying and death technologies is proposed that prioritises transparency, cultural sensitivity, and relational ethics in designing and governing digital technology systems in this area.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148178530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Coded Ethics: Decision-Making and the Responsible Development of Automated Digital Technologies","authors":"Danielle Shanley,&nbsp;Tricia Griffin","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100155","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100155","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100155"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148285174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"AI in professional services: Power, perceptions and tension","authors":"Carl Bezuidenhout ,&nbsp;Michael Mehmet ,&nbsp;Roba Abbas ,&nbsp;Troy Heffernan","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100172","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100172","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Professional judgment in law and accounting is no longer the sole domain of humans. Algorithms, particularly those powered by generative AI that mimic expertise, are reshaping the foundations of professional work. Motivations are clear: speed, higher margins, scalable services, and improved client satisfaction. Yet the real contest is over meaning, and whether professional services delivered through Artificial Intelligence (AI) can achieve the same responsible and trusted value as expertise delivered by humans.</div><div>How AI is understood, and by whom, will shape this trajectory. Like other technologies, its meaning is fluid, anchored in multiple interpretations of its role in society. For regulated professional services firms (PSFs), this means AI’s trajectory is not predetermined, with material consequences for how responsibility, trust, expertise, and professional value are defined.</div><div>This study adopts netnography to analyse a longitudinal dataset of ∼8000 social media posts. Guided by the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) theory, narratives regarding the use of AI in PSFs are examined. The analysis reveals how meaning and perception have shifted, influenced by the unique priorities of professionals, clients, academics, industry regulators, technology developers, and the media.</div><div>The findings show a fractured debate. Commercial voices promote automation, scale, and innovation, while academics, clients, and regulators emphasise governance and ethics but remain less visible. As a result, what AI means in PSFs is being influenced by those with the greatest voice, not those with the greatest accountability. At the centre is a structural tension, where AI enables advice to be produced anywhere, yet responsibility cannot be displaced. In this sense, AI breaks the link between the production and professional accountability of advice. No stabilised understanding of AI’s role in PSFs has emerged. Ongoing contestation leaves firms without closure on how professional value, responsibility, and trust should be defined.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148177748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between ancestors and algorithms: ritual responsibility as a culturally sensitive framework for responsible innovation in DeathTech","authors":"Alessia Maccaro ,&nbsp;Camilla Audia ,&nbsp;Atsou Afaniyzou ,&nbsp;Gothier Daheou ,&nbsp;Esther Cadja Dodo ,&nbsp;Eugenio Zito","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100175","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100175","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines the ethical, cultural, and political implications of DeathTech—digital afterlife technologies such as memorial platforms, chatbots of the deceased, voice clones and AI-generated avatars—arguing that existing frameworks of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) are insufficient when applied to symbolically charged domains such as death and mourning. While current debates often focus on fairness, accountability, privacy and transparency, these procedural tools overlook the ritual, communal and intercultural dimensions through which societies generate meaning around death. Drawing on philosophical analysis, comparative ethics, anthropological literature and empirical fieldwork conducted in Benin, the article introduces the concept of ritual responsibility. This notion captures the ethical obligation to respect and sustain the symbolic boundaries and collective practices that regulate mourning, remembrance and the transition from the status of the deceased to that of an ancestor.</div><div>Beninese Vodun traditions provide a particularly illuminating case study because they articulate death not as an individual event but as a socially mediated transformation enacted through structured rituals, collective responsibility and the mediation of ritual specialists. These practices reveal the limits of universalised governance models and show how mourning can become ethically and psychosocially fragile when severed from communal frameworks. By bringing these insights into dialogue with current digital afterlife technologies, including griefbots, memorialisation platforms and postmortem avatars, the article proposes a ritual-sensitive reconfiguration of RRI.</div><div>The article reinterprets anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness through ritual responsibility and translates this reconstruction into practical governance and design recommendations, including grief impact assessments, collective consent, culturally meaningful temporal limits, interpretability for bereaved users, and accountability metrics oriented toward dignity, community cohesion and symbolic non-harm. It argues that digital afterlife technologies must be designed and regulated not only as technical artefacts but as moral infrastructures capable of reshaping values, relations and collective memory.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148230720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Responsibly adopting workplace mental well-being platforms","authors":"Emma Gentry,&nbsp;Elvira Perez Vallejos,&nbsp;Chris Greenhalgh,&nbsp;Liz Dowthwaite,&nbsp;Vincent Bryce","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100168","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100168","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Employers are increasingly drawn to technology-based solutions to assist employees with their psychological well-being and overall functioning. Yet, employees have some concerns around these technologies, which require further attention, and which may be fundamental to their sustainability in the long-term. To understand how organisations might responsibly deploy ‘off the shelf’ wellbeing solutions, we conducted a series of expert workshops and interviews with union representatives, employees, and organisational representatives in a higher education setting. The final roadmap to platform deployment comprised three stages: (1) foundational concerns pre-deployment and assessing the motivation for a technology-based route, (2) platform-related concerns and assessing the motivation for data-sharing, and (3) data-sharing concerns and sustainability. Most importantly, employees could envision greater acceptability of such tools with a degree of organisational responsiveness to their concerns, which may improve the quality of their engagements over time, and which might spark a curiosity to explore digital offerings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"26 ","pages":"Article 100168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148177749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A UK perspective on responsible education for responsible AI: a multidisciplinary review and evaluation framework","authors":"Maira Klyshbekova ,&nbsp;Gisela Reyes Cruz ,&nbsp;Caitlin Bentley ,&nbsp;Stef Garasto ,&nbsp;Amy Aisha Brown ,&nbsp;Christine Aicardi ,&nbsp;Brian Ball ,&nbsp;Mohammad Naiseh ,&nbsp;Oana Andrei","doi":"10.1016/j.jrt.2025.100147","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jrt.2025.100147","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) education has emerged as a way of approaching the field of AI to address a host of concerns (Bentley et al., 2023). Many education providers have been releasing new RAI-related online courses, programmes, or toolkits. When combined with the issues emerging from the development, deployment, and use of AI, the expansion of RAI education and the proliferation of resources raise two critical questions. First, what can we learn about RAI from examining both the content and structure of publicly available RAI educational resources? Second, how might we understand the quality and impact of these RAI resources? We conducted a systematic search of UK RAI educational resources found online. We first present a descriptive analysis of 211 resources collected, including their type, format, cost, sector, audience, and type of provider. Furthermore, we describe our collaborative approach to analysing four pre-selected resources in-depth, from which we outlined an evaluation framework that we then employed for assessing the content of a subset of 47 resources. The five crucial areas of our framework could guide both learners and developers when approaching RAI resources.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":73937,"journal":{"name":"Journal of responsible technology","volume":"25 ","pages":"Article 100147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145885820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}