Tamar Sharon

Tutorial Speaker Tamar Sharon

Tamar Sharon is Chair of the Department of Ethics and Political Philosophy and co-director of iHub, Radboud’s interfaculty center for research on digitalisation and society. She studied history and political theory at Paris Jussieu and Tel Aviv University, and holds a PhD (cum laude) in interdisciplinary studies from Bar Ilan University in Israel (2011). Her research lies at the intersection of philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS) and critical data studies.

Tamar studies the ethical and societal impacts of new technologies, mainly in relation to health and medicine. She has carried out research on the human enhancement debate, on how citizens and patients enact and resist a new imperative of healthy citizenship through technology use, and how possibilities for self-quantification change our understandings of autonomy, solidarity and authenticity. She currently leads the ERC-funded project Digital Good, which studies the Googlization of health—the growing involvement of large tech corporations in health and medical research—and what this means for the common good.

Tamar previously held positions at Maastricht University and a visiting fellowship at King’s College London. She was a member of the WHO European Advisory Committee on Health Research and is a member of the Young Academy of Europe. She has been a recipient of NWO Rubicon, Veni and Vidi grants, the Mara Bellar Prize (Israeli Society for the History and Philosophy of Science), and the Edmond Hustinx Prize for Science. She is a member of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) at the European Commission.

Talk

The view from ethics: What technologies promise, what they do and who benefits

Tuesday, 16:30
Room: Europe A

This tutorial will provide a broad overview of ethical and societal risks raised by new digital technologies, from robots and chatbots in health, to AI for education and precision agriculture. Focusing on the main promises of technologies, such as reducing workload, increasing efficiency, or improving healthcare, we will look at how and why technologies often fail to deliver on these promises and the ethical consequences of this failure. We will also discuss who benefits from the increased digitalization of critical sectors of society such as health and education, by zooming in on the growing influence of large tech corporations in these sectors and the risks this poses beyond just privacy and data protection.

All invited speakers