The English word “patent” derives from the Latin “patere” meaning “to be open.” Its use in this sense comes from the letters patent issued by kings and other sovereigns wishing to make their edicts open for all to see. In contrast, letters close were edicts that were kept secret. We see this usage o...
In 1968 the immensely influential article by Garrett Hardin titled “The Tragedy of the Commons”[1] was published. In it, Hardin argued that the result of holding exploitable property in common was that each user had an incentive to use more than their fair share before others did. The result was tha...
In 2015 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that are to be reached by the year 2030[1]. In essence, these goals are an attempt to resolve the issue of the “Great Divergence”[2] between industrially developed and undeveloped countries. SDG 9, label...
The fundamental idea behind global standards collaboration is that standardization needs to work seamlessly across borders and organizations in order to succeed. Of course, seamless standardization requires information exchanges among engineers and entities in countries and regions with different ge...
Can Ethics be Standardized? Creating Modern Standards for Ethical Autonomous and Intelligent Systems
Technologists often react with an eye roll when the subject of ethics comes up. One interpretation of this is that they may think ethics is the purview of philosophy and religion and not really within their domain. An engineer may think of it as a “soft” subject, not the hard science and engineering...