Abstract:

Belonging to the new interdisciplinary field of liberal arts and sciences, persuasive technology refers to the technology based on human-computer interaction which may affect and even change the ideas, attitudes or behaviors of human beings. It has been applied widely in many areas of our life and has gained outstanding social effects. However, the properties such as novelty, hiddenness and polymorphism of persuasive technology may have covered the persuasive intents and the limitation on the choice of users, which will put users in a disadvantageous position to be “addicted” to the new “opium”. In order to avoid these ethical problems, we must scrutinize closely and thoroughly the whole process of persuasive technology from the ethical perspective. Technical “bugs” such as stochasticity and indeterminacy of the data-driven algorithmic system and its many moral agents may cause ethical challenges of the attribution of responsibility. We need to go beyond the dichotomy between theoretic ethics and applied ethics, widen the semantic and pragmatic scope of the concept of responsibility and turn from passive responsible ethics of technology to active responsible ethics of technology, in order to solve these challenges.

Key words: human-computer interaction, data-driven algorithmic system, persuasion, accountability, responsible ethics of technology