Professor Eduardo Magrani, researcher from the Center for Technology and Society (CTS) of Rio de Janeiro Law School (Direito Rio), participated in the ETHICOMP 2017 International Conference. During the event, held in Turin, Italy, on June 5-8, the professor presented a paper on the role of regulation by Law in the digital age and the importance of proper ethical guidance to promote technology advances.

According to Magrani, the current technological context of hyper-connectivity poses significant challenges to the preservation of fundamental rights and contemporary ethics, potentially impacting democracy itself.

“The action of algorithms can be seen in a much broader and complex context of action and decision. Today, algorithms not only predict the next best-selling books, but also make death threats and purchase illegal drugs in the Deep Web. In this context, merely acknowledging the ability of algorithms to act and decide as human beings is not enough. We must also think about how the public sphere is being influenced by these agents that can shape, structure, and mediate how we interact,” said the professor.

The event was attended by some of the world’s foremost experts in the subjects of Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, and Internet of Things (IoT). Magrani’s study about IoT recently received support from the Institute of Technology and Society of Alexander Von Humboldt University (Germany) – one of the major think tanks researching the subject in Europe. The paper presented at the event, titled ‘A Techno-Regulated Society: Effects of a Tailored Reality,’ will be published in an international journal.