Value-based engineering v the Silicon Valley Zeitgeist

A European digital public sphere has to be engineered--but that doesn't mean pursuing an AI dystopia or creating a European Facebook. In the early 20th century Simone Weil wrote: 'Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.' Fascinated by the romantic and varied evils presumably awaiting humanity in the face of Ray Kurzweil's artificial-intelligence'singularity', many institutions and expert groups around the world proceeded to draw up lists of values to be respected, no matter how dystopic our transhumanistic future would be. A few prominent examples are the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the European Commission, with its high-level expert group on AI. Important value principles were endorsed for future AI systems, such as human oversight, safety, privacy, transparency, fairness and wellbeing.