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The purpose of this paper is to list and discuss several workers on cybernetics and systems, all fairly recently deceased. Online sources of further details are quoted.

The aim is to review developments on the internet, especially those of general cybernetic interest.

The demise of these workers is a great loss.

For all of the people listed, it is instructive to contemplate their achievements and to speculate on what else they would have done had they lived.

It is hoped this is a valuable periodic review.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the question of equipping fully autonomous robotic weapons with the capacity to kill. Current ideas concerning the feasibility and advisability of developing and deploying such weapons, including the proposal that they be equipped with a so-called “ethical governor”, are reviewed and critiqued. The perspective adopted for this study includes software engineering practice as well as ethical and legal aspects of the use of lethal autonomous robotic weapons.

In the paper, the author survey and critique the applicable literature.

In the current paper, the author argue that fully autonomous robotic weapons with the capacity to kill should neither be developed nor deployed, that research directed toward equipping such weapons with a so-called “ethical governor” is immoral and serves as an “ethical smoke-screen” to legitimize research and development of these weapons and that, as an ethical duty, engineers and scientists should condemn and refuse to participate in their development.

This is a new approach to the argument for banning autonomous lethal robotic weapons based on classical work of Joseph Weizenbaum, Helen Nissenbaum and others.

The aim of this paper is to answer the question: how can judgment about good and bad behavior of a device or service under development be included in the development process?

By distinguishing between detached good/bad judgment, called “ethics of the eye”, and judgment about good and bad behavior embedded in doing and dialogue, called “ethics of the hand”, two examples of designer judgment are examined, one embedded and one detached. The outcome is explained by means of an application of Ricoeur's hermeneutics, where he shows how narration comprises pre-figuration, con-figuration and re-figuration. An examination of collaborative prototyping in Krzysztof Wodiczko's work on building a vehicle together with homeless people in Manhattan, New York, is contrasted with an example of the detached evaluation of use in Joseph Weizenbaum's account for use of his computer therapy program Eliza.

The difference is identified as the difference between joint making and dialogue, resulting in re-configuration, and detached evaluation, which sticks with the pre-figuration. The paper concludes that for engineering and design at large “ethics of the hand”, the collaborative doing and dialogue, where the engineering and the designerly way of understanding come together over a prototype, brings out a shared frame, which makes ethics an integrated part of the development process.

The paper discusses how judgment about good and bad behavior of a device or service under development can be included in the development process and shows that the answer is collaborative prototyping.

It has been assumed that electronic computers and telematics are part of an electronic revolution which causes to obsolesce many of the perceptual, psychic and social cultural effects of phonetic literacy and typography and their subsequent perceptual, psychic, and social effects, particularly as they relate to the lifestyles and production techniques we associate with the seventeenth‐century new science and the mechanical Industrial Revolution. Shows that the digital computer, “the ultimate assembly line”, and its various effects represent a vast extention and amplification of centuries‐old trends, and, indeed, seem to present us with habits and attitudes at odds with those induced by older electronic media such as radio and television. Among the results of digital technologies are business‐as‐usual 24 hours a day and societal breakdown which occurs as a result of continuing acceleration and the splitting apart of human functions and human psyche.

To discuss the concept of cybernetics, and to point out its complexities.

Cybernetics can be seen as a scientific concept of harnessing complexity as a feedback phenomenon and a project aimed at establishing a new control science and adaptive technology based on the formalization of complexity. Today, we still do not have adaptive or complex computers.

Cybernetics has failed both as a concept and a project, and is becoming a case for historians. But before it is classified as just a short scientific episode between the atomic bomb and cyberwar, a closer look will show that it was not only a military sponsored project driven by the cold war of the 1950s but also a rebellious movement inspired by the visions of the 1960s. Heinz von Foerster more than anyone else represented this human face of cybernetics.

Considers some of the thought‐provoking ideas of Heinz von Foerster in the history of cybernetics.

This study responds to Agnieszka Landowska’s paper about the lack of accuracy in emotion recognition.

The approach is purely theoretical. The paper also refers to empirical studies.

The author first elaborates on Landowska’s “postulates” (normative guidelines) and then shortly expands on how virtual chatbots such as “AI therapists” pose considerable challenges to emotion recognition algorithms as well.

This viewpoint’s value is to elaborate and expand on an ongoing discussion on emotion recognition technologies.

This paper aims to explore integrating chatbot applications into libraries to improve reference services.

This paper explores the benefits of using chatbots as virtual reference librarians. Emma the Mentor Public Library’s Catbot is used as a case study.

Chatbots cannot replicate the complexity of human interaction (both knowledge and emotional), but these can provide a cost-effective way to answer the majority of routine reference questions and direct users to the appropriate service.

Readers will increase their awareness of how chatbots can streamline the work of the reference department by answering the majority of routine reference questions and freeing library staff to focus on more demanding research and tasks uniquely suited to humans.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Slow Tech can support the celebration of the 20-year series of ETHICOMP conferences, with its ethical and societal focus, building on earlier descriptions of Slow Tech. The paper takes Slow Tech’s ideas a step further to explore how a roadmap and concrete checklist of activities can be developed.

The paper is a thought leadership or conceptual piece. Its approach is based on a normative, qualitative discourse. It, nevertheless, indicates a shift towards concrete actions.

Extracting from a brief historical overview, the paper lays out the means of building a Slow Tech roadmap and a Slow Tech checklist of actions. It also investigates a number of the challenges that might face Slow Tech in the future.

The paper has implications for stakeholder fields as far-ranging as corporations, computing professional associations, universities and research institutions and end-users.

As with other investigations of Slow Tech, the value of this paper is in its call for reflection followed by action. It provides a useful complement and counterbalance to an earlier paper by the same authors: “Slow Tech: a quest for good, clean and fair ICT” published in Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (Vol. 12, issue 2, pp. 78-92).