RI Columns Chapter 1

This week’s topic introduced us to many new terms related to responsibility, like causal and moral responsibility, but also individual and collective responsibility. To decide whether a person or party is either causal or morally responsible always depends on the amount of knowledge that this person or party has about the problem.   In particular, knowledge is required in order to be morally…

”Responsible Innovation requires several I’s, and they need to work together.” By Olivier Rutgers “The greatest danger to our future is apathy”   Jane Goodall, anthropologist and biologist Growing up in a first world country as a privileged male college student has a lot of advantages. But we tend to forget this when we start worrying if our phone will still be charged enough so we can watch an…

Although week 1 had many topics to introduce, I strongly believe that group one organized their activities and presentations well. Not only did they use course materials but also they came up with own examples from real life. What I also liked about the way they presented is that one of members did some drawings when he was explaining about moral and causal involvement. He came up with a specific…

We in the Netherlands are surrounded by media influences all day. We can look at nu.nl, buy newspapers or even receive them in our mailbox every morning. If we turn on the television there is a nearly constant stream of news differentiating from Al Jazeera to BBC world news, and NPO nieuws to RTL Z. Everything is available at all times, and everything is open for discussion due to social media…

Innovation is part of human history, from the swamp to the stars was and still is a journey filled with innovation in every aspect of life. Going from simple tools to modern weapons, from tents to houses and so on, as well as advances in social constructions in society and many more examples. In the recent years innovation has become especially important, as a shifting economy from linear to…

Looking at the hypothetical example in which four persons were involved in the development of new fire-resistant material, discussed in the Responsible Innovation course. It becomes clear that none of them are responsible when looking at the four conditions of responsibility.   In my opinion this problem could have been prevented in many ways. But first I will clarify the actors involved in this…

In this week’s lecture we talked about the different types of responsibility. We’ve talked about individual responsibility and collective responsibility. The main course of the lecture was the case about the refugees that have begun to flee in larger numbers towards Europe. In the lecture we did a game which dealt on how the individual and on the collective level. All this deals with how to solve…

We live in a modern age with smartphones and fiber-optic internet, on one side of the planet. The other side consists of people fighting over whose God is the righteous one (though they all believe in the same one), enslaved workers building life-sized playgrounds for the oil-enriched royals, and a billion people strong country that is polluting to death not only itself,  but the Earth as a whole…

Just like so many others, I too saw the page-filling image in last week’s papers of the three-year-old boy Aylan , washed up the shore nearby Bodrum, Turkey. He drowned when he and his family tried to escape the war in Syria. The images of the boy lying face-down on the beach and being carried away by a Turkish police officer shocked people all across the world, including myself and probably you

Values create the standard of a persons behavior, they influence how we make decisions and effectively run our lives. They can be instilled in us or we can choose to adopt them from our social environment such as family, religion, friends etc. One thing is certain,  our values are constantly changing. When we have strong and positive values, they will be integral to achieving what we want in this…

W hat struck me after having our first few lectures within the minor Responsible Innovation is that most innovations are a direct response to demand. Engineers and innovators look for holes in the market or already existing products that need improvement. That is why forward-looking responsibility carries such high importance when considering new innovations. The idea behind new products or…

‘I consume therefore I am’ describes a wide spread mentality of the western society in the 21 st century. You can argue that there are more aspects involved but if you take a look at the amount of waste and unnecessary goods we produce I think that statement gives a quite good reflection on the modern society. You are what you own! However with a growing awareness of the consequences of our…

We  live too fast. Too fast to enjoy and to give something back. Today I read an article on a huge research done by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on sea life. The name of this report was the Living Blue Planet. The article was published on the NOS news site and removed from it half an hour after publication. Probably the news wasn’t that entertaining. But anyway; the research stuck to my mind. To…

In the last decade the amount of people using social media has grown tremendously. I believe that all this sharing on the internet has changed our culture. People nowadays share pictures and opinions so easily on the internet without really thinking about the consequences. In most cases you don’t have to, but in the case of sexting you do. I’ve had several pictures of naked girls that have been…

Last week I was walking through Amsterdam and someone in the street came to me and asked me if he could ask some questions about the reputation of the ABN Amro bank. The bank is owned by the government since it had to be saved on the verge of bankruptcy in 2008.  This bank has had some very bad publicity in the last weeks because of a salary raise for the board members. It wouldn’t surprise you…

S ome things what the creators of the movie ‘Back to the Future 2’ from 1989 thought would happen in the year 2015, actually happened. Also the drones, which are flying robots, exists. Unfortunately, drones are a danger for air traffic, because the onboard radar of the airplane can’t see it. They also can be used in wars. Because the development of these kind of robots went so fast, the rules…

Taking down flight MH17 goes into history as a crime with a bitter taste. It’s a clear warning of the time we are living in right now. But what are we going to do about it when our Defence isn’t taken serious enough? Do we act responsible in this way? Who actually took down the plane isn’t truly discovered yet. The investigation of the disaster and bringing back the bodies of the two hundred…