4.1 The Length of Life Cycles: the Lotka-Volterra Model
4.2 Dangers are Long-Lasting: Onkalo, Finland
4.3 Eternally Saving Crops for Humanity: Svalbard, Norway
4.4 Stimulating Long-Term Thinking: Van Horn, Texas
4.5 Limiting the Speed of Machines: the New York Stock Exchange
4.6 The Recovery of Control
5 Information: Environmental and Human Limits
5.1 The Characteristics of Information
5.1.1 An initial focus on the time dimension
5.1.2 Information sharing in space and time
5.1.3 How information provision has developed over time
5.2 Environmental Limits: Towards the End of Moore’s Law?
5.2.1 Computers are not washing machines
5.3 Human Limits: Individual and Collective Bandwidth
5.3.1 Individual bandwidth
5.3.2 Collective bandwidth
6 The beginning of a new Renaissance in ICT
6.1 Co-Shaping of Technology and Society
6.1.1 The early days of computing
6.1.2 Computing use in wartime
6.1.3 Host computing
6.1.4 Personal computing
6.1.5 Cloud computing
6.2 Towards a Proactive Computer Ethics
6.2.1 The dawn of computer ethics
6.2.2 A policy vacuum
6.2.3 Further shifts in computer ethics
6.2.4 Proactive computer ethics
6.3 ICT as Complex Socio-Technical Systems
6.3.1 Systemic design
6.3.2 Importance of complex systems in computer science
6.4 Innovation
6.4.1 Innovation, ethics and Responsible Research and Innovation
6.5 A Model for Responsible Research and Innovation
7 Slow Tech: A Good, Clean, and Fair ICT
7.1 Introducing a Slow Tech Compass
7.2 Adapting the Principles of the Slow Food Movement to ICT
7.3 Good ICT
7.3.1 Good ICT as socially desirable ICT
7.3.2 Good ICT as hospitable ICT
7.3.3 Good ICT and a balance between leisure and working time
7.3.4 Good ICT and slower life
7.3.5 Good ICT and learning
7.3.6 Good ICT and studies of the human mind
7.4 Clean ICT
7.4.1 Clean ICT and climate change
7.4.2 Clean ICT and e-waste
7.5 Fair ICT
7.5.1 Fair ICT and ethics
7.5.2 Being ethical: working with shared values
7.5.3 Fair ICT and the rights of workers
7.5.4 Fair ICT and the health of workers
7.5.5 Fair ICT and its open spanning layers
7.5.6 Fair ICT and war
8 Applying Slow Tech in Real Life
8.1 Moving towards an Understanding of Complex Human Beings
8.2 Starting a Dialogue with Stakeholders
8.2.1 Younger generations
8.2.2 Users
8.2.3 Computer professionals
8.2.4 ICT companies
8.3 Applying the Slow Tech Method
8.3.1 Is this cloud computing good?
8.3.2 Is this cloud computing clean?
8.3.3 Is this cloud computing fair?
8.4 Locating Existing Examples of Slow Tech Companies
8.4.1 Olivetti
8.4.2 Loccioni
8.4.3 Fairphone
9 Energy, time and information: A long-term view of ICT
9.1 A Longer-Term View of Sustainable ICT over Time
9.2 Spreng’s Triangle
9.3 An Application of the Brakes with a Focus on Human Happiness
Norberto Patrignani is Associate Lecturer of Computer Ethics at Politecnico di Torino and of ICT & Information Society at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy, ethics expert to the European Commission, and Scientific Advisor to the Loccioni Group, Ancona, Italy. He is the Italian representative to IFIP’s Technical Committee on Computers and Society.
Diane Whitehouse is a founding partner of The Castlegate Consultancy, which concentrates on research, policy, and deployment in digital health, and an eHealth policy consultant at European Health Telematics Association (EHTEL), Belgium. She is co-Chair of the International Federation for Information Processing’s (IFIP) domain committee on health informatics. In 2017, she was awarded HIMSS Europe’s eHealth Leadership Award.
This book makes an important contribution to the recent evolution in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that are human-centred and socially desirable, environmentally sustainable, and ethically acceptable. It introduces the concept of moral, equitable and environmental limits in the ICT domain and proposes a Slow Tech approach to face the challenges of these limits, laying out a set of principles that can be applied in real-life business settings. With the launch of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the growing interest in the circular economy, Slow Tech and ICT - A Responsible, Sustainable and Ethical Approach is a timely tool for forward-thinking businesses.