6.6 Summary - Modern challenges to responsibility

• We live in a highly networked and technologised world in which people work together collaboratively and thus cause events that can no longer be grasped with a traditional understanding of responsibility. This is particularly true when we look into the future and, to a certain extent, have to take responsibility today for events that we cannot know whether and how they will occur tomorrow and who exactly could have caused them.

• Hans Jonas' imperative of responsibility thematises human existence in its entirety and in general. Due to the technical possibilities that humans have developed, they have the power to destroy themselves and the earth.

• It is life, the living itself, that has become the focus of responsibility. It is no longer just man with his interests. It is no longer just man who is an end in himself; in the imperative of responsibility nature is also recognised as an end in itself.

• In the event of damage to the environment due to inadequate mining practice, the experts in charge would be "guilty" in terms of the principle of responsibility not only towards their fellow human beings, but towards nature as a whole.

• The distant and future consequences of our actions can no longer be traced back to individual people, but are the result of the uncoordinated actions of countless people. We are dealing with cumulative effects. With regard to the use of algorithms in decision-making processes, the interconnectedness of causal events and subsequent consequences becomes immeasurable.

• But how can a system be held responsible? In simple terms, the answer is: through the steering of design and/or context. For example, one could try to feed ethical aspects into the processes of a system or one could try to steer the system dynamics in a desired direction via legislation or monetary incentives or similar.

• Complex system responsibility is an attempt to provide an answer to the complexity of modern societies with their equally complex social and technological subsystems.

• Each individual mining processional can under certain circumstances exert a great deal of influence in the system, especially if they have access to decisive issues and interfaces.

• When it comes to the question of responsibility, we should also always consider what we cannot be responsible for and what therefore lies within the realm beyond our responsibility.

• It can be wise to refrain from acting rashly and to exercise a well-considered and reflected practical caution in our decisions and actions. This is not to be understood as a foot on the brake of our lives. Rather it should be seen as an attitude that arises from the knowledge of systemic connections and complex modes of action, whose autonomy - once triggered - can hardly be contained.

• This attitude can serve as an orientation for individual engineers in their specific professional tasks and duties of their everyday work.

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