Samenvatting

Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and augmented/virtual reality come with many ethical and societal questions. In order to develop applications based on these technologies responsibly, businesses, governments and knowledge institutions are increasingly working together, and sometimes also involve citizens. To tackle the challenge of the ‘responsible digital transition’, Living Labs are often chosen as a methodology for triple-or quadruple-helix co-creation and experiment. One example are the Dutch ELSA labs introduced in 2019 by the Dutch Al Coalition as open labs tackling ethical, legal and societal aspects in the development and application of artificial intelligence. Societal aspects of responsible digitalization also span across the ecological and societal underpinnings and repercussions of technologies. Al systems, for example, rely on an enormous amount of energy, scarce raw materials, consumer manipulation and unethical labour arrangements to train algorithms. These systemic issues are complex and intangible, in part because of their interrelatedness with many different stakeholders and invisible power dynamics that are at play. The dialogue necessary between lab stakeholders thus increases in complexity when systemic issues are introduced. Nevertheless, the Al practice is multi-disciplinary by nature and responsible Al development will benefit from being aligned within dialogues about policymaking, regulatory processes, and design decisions.AI