Christian Sillaber, Bernhard Waltl, Horst Treiblmaier, Ulrich Gallersdörfer · 5 authors
Abstract Smart contracts are seen as the major building blocks for future autonomous blockchain- and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based applications. Engineering such contracts for trustless, append-only, and decentralized digital ledgers allows mutually distrustful parties to transform legal requirements into immutable and formalized rules. Previous experience shows this to be a challenging task due to demanding socio-technical ecosystems and the specificities of decentralized ledger technology. In this paper, we therefore develop an integrated process model for engineering DLT-based smart contracts that accounts for the specificities of DLT. This model was iteratively refined with the support of industry experts. The model explicitly accounts for the immutability of the trustless, append-only, and decentralized DLT ecosystem, and thereby overcomes certain limitations of traditional software engineering process models. More specifically, it consists of five successive and closely intertwined phases: conceptualization, implementation, approval, execution, and finalization. For each phase, the respective activities, roles, and artifacts are identified and discussed in detail. Applying such a model when engineering smart contracts will help software engineers and developers to better understand and streamline the engineering process of DLTs in general and blockchain in particular. Furthermore, this model serves as a generic framework which will support application development in all fields in which DLT can be applied.
Like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the broader, mainstream emergence of blockchain technology in the present moment of, what I call, data dysphoria is no accident. It is in part reaction to data dysphoria, and in part exploitation of it, a duality underpinned by the tantalising promise of the prosumer ‘taking control’ of their data and establishing sovereignty over it. Blockchain and GDPR alike aim to resolve ‘problem’/’solution’ matrices with deep roots in a wide variety of global economic, political, social, legal and cultural contexts. This article explores the problem of achieving resolution based on innovation and technology by offering an account of the rise of blockchain and implementation of GDPR within a psycho-political framework, one in which fantasies of taking control are predominant yet highly contestable actualities in the lives of technology users.
Development of disruptive IT within the frame of Czech legislation Abstract New information technologies, such as biometric technologies, distributed ledger technology, cloud computing, the internet of things and virtual reality, are increasingly transforming our way of live. Technologies that radically transform our society are referred to as "disruptive technologies". This thesis focuses on the main application of disruptive information technologies, which is the use of artificial intelligence. The first part of thesis presents the issue, explains the basic concepts and differences between augmented intelligence, special artificial intelligence and general autonomous artificial intelligence. Furthermore, it summarizes the Czech legislation reflecting current technological developments. The summary of the most important aspects of the current legislation is a prerequisite to identify its limits and shortcomings in order to analyze the challenges that need to be taken into account when proposing appropriate future legislation. The aim of the thesis is to identify and present the main challenges that the development of disruptive information technologies brings to the Czech legislation. These challenges include the ethical and philosophical grounding of disruptive information technology, which determines...
Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
Legal, Health, Environmental and COVID-19 Challenges
The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from centralized models toward decentralized architectures has fundamentally reshaped the paradigms of data management, ownership, and governance. In traditional AI ecosystems, data is consolidated within centralized repositories for model training and analytics, resulting in challenges related to privacy, latency, and compliance with regulatory frameworks. Decentralized AI architectures encompassing federated learning, edge AI, swarm intelligence, and blockchain-based frameworks offer a transformative alternative that aligns technological innovation with distributed data governance principles. These architectures enable AI systems to learn collaboratively across multiple nodes or organizations without transferring raw data, ensuring data sovereignty and compliance with global data protection mandates such as GDPR and CCPA. This review examines how decentralized AI architectures influence distributed data governance by promoting transparency, trust, and accountability in multi-party data ecosystems. The integration of AI with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies provides immutable audit trails and decentralized identity management, enabling verifiable governance across federated networks. Moreover, privacy-preserving techniques such as differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, and secure multiparty computation empower organizations to perform analytics on encrypted datasets while maintaining compliance with ethical and legal data-handling standards. Through a synthesis of academic research and real-world applications, the review highlights the significant advantages of decentralized AI, including enhanced privacy assurance, reduced systemic risks, and improved collaboration among data stakeholders. However, the transition toward decentralized intelligence introduces new challenges related to interoperability, communication overhead, and model convergence in distributed environments. Ensuring fairness, accountability, and explainability within federated systems remains a critical governance issue, as decentralized decision-making increases complexity in auditing and oversight. Furthermore, the governance of AI models themselves rather than just data poses emerging regulatory and ethical questions in globally interconnected ecosystems.
Machine learning has recently enabled large advances in artificial intelligence, but these results can be highly centralized. The large datasets required are generally proprietary; predictions are often sold on a per-query basis; and published models can quickly become out of date without effort to acquire more data and maintain them. Published proposals to provide models and data for free for certain tasks include Microsoft Research's Decentralized and Collaborative AI on Blockchain. The framework allows participants to collaboratively build a dataset and use smart contracts to share a continuously updated model on a public blockchain. The initial proposal gave an overview of the framework omitting many details of the models used and the incentive mechanisms in real world scenarios. In this work, we evaluate the use of several models and configurations in order to propose best practices when using the Self-Assessment incentive mechanism so that models can remain accurate and well-intended participants that submit correct data have the chance to profit. We have analyzed simulations for each of three models: Perceptron, Naïve Bayes, and a Nearest Centroid Classifier, with three different datasets: predicting a sport with user activity from Endomondo, sentiment analysis on movie reviews from IMDB, and determining if a news article is fake. We compare several factors for each dataset when models are hosted in smart contracts on a public blockchain: their accuracy over time, balances of a good and bad user, and transaction costs (or gas) for deploying, updating, collecting refunds, and collecting rewards. A free and open source implementation for the Ethereum blockchain and simulations written in Python is provided at https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B. This version has updated gas costs using newer optimizations written after the original publication.
Applications of Blockchain (BC) technology and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are increasing exponentially. However, framing resilient and correct smart contracts (SCs) for these smart application is a quite challenging task because of the complexity associated with them. SC is modernizing the traditional industrial, technical, and business processes. It is self-executable, self-verifiable, and embedded into the BC that eliminates the need for trusted third-party systems, which ultimately saves administration as well as service costs. It also improves system efficiency and reduces the associated security risks. However, SCs are well encouraging the new technological reforms in Industry 4.0, but still, various security and privacy challenges need to be addressed. In this paper, a survey on SC security vulnerabilities in the software code that can be easily hacked by a malicious user or may compromise the entire BC network is presented. As per the literature, the challenges related to SC security and privacy are not explored much by the authors around the world. From the existing proposals, it has been observed that designing a complex SCs cannot mitigate its privacy and security issues. So, this paper investigates various Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and tools for SC privacy protection. Then, open issues and challenges for AI-based SC are analyzed. Finally, a case study of retail marketing is presented, which uses AI and SC to preserve its security and privacy.
Abstract This paper provides, from a business ethics perspective, a basic clustering of the morally (a) favorable, (b) unfavorable, and (c) ambivalent dimensions of blockchain technology and its various emergent applications. Instead of proffering specific assessments on particular aspects of blockchain‐based business models, we aim to offer an initial overview that charters the territory so that future research can bring about such moral assessments in an informed and orderly fashion. The main contribution of this paper lies in identifying several morally ambivalent dimensions of blockchain technology, which we finally link to two strands of business ethics research: ethical and legal aspects of legislation as well as a link to Habermasian corporate social responsibility theory arguing for transparent data production and consumption on the blockchain. We conclude that future research is necessary for moral assessment of the ambivalent cases, since their ethical evaluation changes depending on whether one analyzes them through the lenses of utilitarianism, contractarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics, respectively.
Agreements, consensuses, protocols, resource-sharing, and fairness are all examples of social and political metaphors that define and shape new computational algorithms. The thought experiments and allegories about resource-sharing or agreement between nodes played a vital role in the development of "concurrent programming" (enabling processor power-sharing and process synchronization) and still later in the development of distributed computing (facilitating data access and synchronization). These paved the way for current concepts of consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, and other descriptions of cryptocurrencies, blockchain, distributed ledger, and hashgraph technologies, paradoxically reversing the relations between metaphor and artifact. New computing concepts and algorithmic processes, such as consensus mechanisms, trustless networks, and automated smart contracts or DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organizations), aim to disrupt social contracts and political decision-making and replace economic, social, and political institutions (e.g., law, money, voting). Rather than something that needs a metaphor, algorithms are becoming the metaphor of good governance. Current fantasies of algorithmic governance exemplify this reversal of the role played by metaphors: they reduce all concepts of governance to automation and curtail opportunities for defining new computing challenges inspired by the original allegories, thought experiments, and metaphors. Especially now, when we are still learning how best to govern the transgressions and excesses of emerging distributed ledger technologies, productive relations between software and allegory, algorithms and metaphors, code and law are possible so long as they remain transitive. Against this tyranny of algorithms and technologies as metaphors and aspirational models of governance, we propose sandboxes and environments that allow stakeholders to combine prototyping with deliberation, algorithms with metaphors, codes with regulations.
Bitcoin is an innovative technological network, a new, non-governmental currency, and a worldwide group of users. In other words, Bitcoin is a complex sociotechnical system with a complex set of risks and challenges for anyone using it. We investigated how everyday users of Bitcoin develop trust in Bitcoin on one of the largest online communities devoted to Bitcoin: the Reddit.com r/bitcoin forum. Using qualitative content analysis, we examined how trust in Bitcoin develops based on contributions to this community. On r/bitcoin, trust in Bitcoin is driven by a pervasive ideology we call the "True Bitcoiner" ideology. This ideological viewpoint in centered on the interpretation of Bitcoin as functionally "trustless" and risk-free. Despite widespread evidence of emerging individual and system-level risks with using Bitcoin, participants continue to maintain this ideological perspective. This ideology consists of three primary beliefs: viewing Bitcoin's technology as more trustworthy than its people; rejecting 'corrupt' social hierarchies related to money; and the importance of accumulating or 'HODLing' quantities of Bitcoin as a strategy to create an ideal future. We conclude that this "True Bitcoiner" ideology is maintained despite contradictory evidence in the world because it allows participants to more easily interpret Bitcoin and make decisions by reducing perceived risk and uncertainty in the system. The role of this ideology on r/bitcoin demonstrates an expanded conceptualization of how trust is created and socially-mediated in socio-technical contexts.
Sociotechnical imaginaries are futures that people envision might be possible and desirable. They have a real impact on how systems are designed and what values they have embedded in their design. This article examines imaginaries about autonomous systems, decentralized systems, and decentralized autonomous systems. Through a discussion of the literature on autonomous and decentralized systems and how these imaginaries play out in the blockchain community based on my qualitative research, I demonstrate how decentralized autonomous systems are related to imaginaries about the organization of and the future of work. I identify three framings of imaginaries about autonomous systems: (1) autonomous technology as physical objects, (2) as mathematical rules, and (3) as artificial mangers. I also identify two sometimes conflicting framings of imaginaries about distributed and decentralized technology: these technologies as a new form of production and as freedom from control. These imaginaries intersect in decentralized autonomous systems, and I examine what they can tell us about the design and governance of such technologies. Lastly, I suggest ways of using the concept of imaginaries in participatory design.
Yong Tang, Jason Xiong, Rafael Becerril‐Arreola, Lakshmi Iyer
Purpose The purpose of this paper is fourfold: first, to provide the first systematic study on the ethics of blockchain, mapping its main socio-technical challenges in technology and applications; second, to identify ethical issues of blockchain; third, to propose a conceptual framework of blockchain ethics study; fourth, to discuss ethical issues for stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach The paper employs literature research, research agenda and framework development. Findings Ethics of blockchain and its applications is essential for technology adoption. There is a void of research on blockchain ethics. The authors propose a first theoretical framework of blockchain ethics. Research agenda is proposed for future search. Finally, the authors recommend measures for stakeholders to facilitate the ethical adequacy of blockchain implementations and future Information Systems (IS) research directions. This research raises timely awareness and stimulates further debate on the ethics of blockchain in the IS community. Originality/value First, this work provides timely systematic research on blockchain ethics. Second, the authors propose the first research framework of blockchain ethics. Third, the authors identify key research questions of blockchain ethics. Fourth, this study contributes to the understanding of blockchain technology and its societal impacts.
Providing a 360° view of a given data item especially for sensitive data is essential toward not only protecting the data and associated privacy but also assuring trust, compliance, and ethics of the systems that use or manage such data. With the advent of General Data Protection Regulation, California Data Privacy Law, and other such regulatory requirements, it is essential to support data transparency in all such dimensions. Moreover, data transparency should not violate privacy and security requirements. In this article, we put forward a vision for how data transparency would be achieved in a de-centralized fashion using blockchain technology.
Yong Tang, Jason Xiong, Rafael Becerril‐Arreola, Lakshmi Iyer
Blockchain is being widely adopted far beyond finance into numerous domains of society and promises unprecedented potential to disrupt organizations, businesses, industries, and economies. However, blockchain is still in its infancy and its future is highly controversial, arousing phenomenal enthusiasm, high expectations, and even intense criticism. The possible impacts of blockchain and its applications on the society could be fundamental and revolutionary, inevitably bringing unpredicted ethical challenges in the foreseeable future. Identifying the ethical challenges of blockchain is urgent and critically needed to ensure that blockchain is adopted ethically. However, discussions on the ethics of blockchain are largely insufficient, which leaves a void of theoretical understanding so far. In this paper, we provide a systematic discussion on the ethics of blockchain applications and map the main social challenges raised by its technology and applications. The paper starts with a review of the technological concepts and applications of blockchain. Then, it overviews the current research on the ethics of technologies and general research on blockchain to briefly introduce the authors' approach. Afterwards, a conceptual model of blockchain ethics research is developed. This research hopes to serve as an initial roadmap for the study of blockchain ethics, and to raise timely awareness and stimulate further debate on the ethics of blockchain in the IS community.