Modern technologies are creating all sorts of new possibilities – and presenting us with new decisions to take. As a bridgebuilding discipline, ethics mediates between the analogue and digital worlds and provides a sense of orientation. The human being – by which we mean all people – must remain the focus of our considerations and actions. Otherwise we run the risk of pursuing progress only for the sake of progress, and ending up becoming a sorcerer’s apprentice who no longer determines, but is controlled.
Technological opportunities such as automated data processing and artificial intelligence are increasingly being used to get a quick and reliable overview of a situation. But are the seemingly objectified decisions that machines take really fair? To what extent should the errorprone factor of human beings be taken into account? The ethicist and theologian Thomas Gremsl deals with these questions in his research.