Neil McBride

Evaluating the factors affecting DSS usage by senior managers in local authorities in Egypt

The study of factors influencing the adoption and use of information systems in less-developed countries is an important area to address since differences in culture, social structure, and business approaches may have significant effects on the benefits derived from importing Western-influenced IT technology, concepts, and management approaches. This study examines the usage of a decision support system (DSS) in Egyptian local authorities using an adapted Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The centrally-developed DSS had been rolled out to 27 governorates in Egypt for use by chief executive officers. The results demonstrated that TAM could be applied to a specific system within a developing country. Both perceived ease of use (PEU) and perceived usefulness (PU) had a significant direct effect on DSS usage. PEU dominated over PU whose effect on DSS usage was negative.

The Ethical Implications of Personal Health Monitoring

Personal Health Monitoring (PHM) uses electronic devices which monitor and record health-related data outside a hospital, usually within the home. This paper examines the ethical issues raised by PHM. Eight themes describing the ethical implications of PHM are identified through a review of 68 academic articles concerning PHM. The identified themes include privacy, autonomy, obtrusiveness and visibility, stigma and identity, medicalisation, social isolation, delivery of care, and safety and technological need. The issues around each of these are discussed. The system / lifeworld perspective of Habermas is applied to develop an understanding of the role of PHMs as mediators of communication between the institutional and the domestic environment. Furthermore, links are established between the ethical issues to demonstrate that the ethics of PHM involves a complex network of ethical interactions. The paper extends the discussion of the critical effect PHMs have on the patients identity and concludes that a holistic understanding of the ethical issues surrounding PHMs will help both researchers and practitioners in developing effective PHM implementations.1

The ethics of driverless cars

This paper critiques the idea of full autonomy, as illustrated by Oxford Universitys Robotcar. A fully autonomous driverless car relies on no external inputs, including GPS and solely learns from its environment using learning algorithms. These cars decide when they drive, learn from human drivers and bid for insurance in real time. Full autonomy is pitched as a good end in itself, fixing human inadequacies and creating safety and certainty by the elimination of human involvement. Using the ACTIVE ethics framework, an ethical response to the fully autonomous driverless cars is developed by addressing autonomy, community, transparency, identity, value and empathy. I suggest that the pursuit of full autonomy does not recognise the essential importance of interdependencies between humans and machines. The removal of human involvement should require the driverless car to be more connected with its environment, drawing all the information it can from infrastructure, internet and other road users. This requires a systemic view, which addresses systems and relationships, which recognises the place of driverless cars in a connected system, which is open to the study of complex relationships, both networked and hierarchical.

The ethics of software engineering should be an ethics for the client

Viewing software engineering as a communicative art in which client engagement is essential.

Development and emancipation: The information society and decision support systems in local authorities in Egypt

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the emancipatory promises and realities of information and communication technology (ICT) in Egypt.Design/methodology/approach – The combination of Habermasian and Foucauldian ideas implemented by a critical discourse analysis of the Egyptian Information Society Policy and interviews with employees of local decision support systems employees. Promises and rhetoric are contrasted with findings and questioned with regards to their validity.Findings – On the policy level, analysis shows that the emancipating rhetoric of ICT is not followed through. ICT is mostly seen as a means of attracting foreign direct investment. Neither political participation nor educational benefits are promoted seriously. On the local level, culture and organisational realities prevent individuals from exploiting the emancipatory potential of the technology.Originality/value – The combination of the Habermasian and Foucauldian approach exposes the problems of ICT use in developin...

Bridging the Ethical Gap: From Human Principles to Robot Instructions

Asimovs three laws of robotics and the Murphy-Woods alternative laws assume that a robot has the cognitive ability to make moral decisions, and fail to escape the myth of self-sufficiency. But ethical decision making on the part of robots in human-robot interaction is grounded on the interdependence of human and machine. Furthermore, the proposed laws are high-level principles that cannot easily be translated into machine instructions because there is an immense gap between the architecture, implementation, and activity of humans and robots in addressing ethical situations. The characterization of the ethical gap, particularly with reference to the Murphy-Woods laws, leads to a proposal for a shift in focus away from the autonomous behavior of the robot to human-robot communication at the interface, and the development of interdependence rules to underpin the process of ethical decision-making.