Van ethische dilemma’s naar toekomstdenken: immersieve technologie als katalysator voor inclusieve besluitvorming

Technological innovations bring urgent ethical questions with them. These questions call not only for an assessment of what is desirable, but also for anticipating possible futures and the values that are central to them. A major barrier to inclusive decision-making is a lack of futures awareness and ethical capacity. Many people find it hard to imagine the implications of technology. Non-users in particular experience a knowledge gap and feel they cannot join the conversation, even though they do undergo technology's impact. This problem is reinforced because the future of a technology is often imagined by a handful of companies whose business models encourage polarisation and digital dependency, while environmental impact and social costs are externalised. This increases the likelihood of one-sided decision-making. The project applies ethics-by-design by involving a city's residents inclusively and actively in exploring ethical dilemmas around emerging technology. We use social friction as a source of innovation and connect technology development to values such as safety, power and inclusion. The research focuses on strengthening the imagination through two 'Moral Labs': 1 - a traditional presentation (image and text), followed by a conversation; 2 - an immersive presentation in Virtual Reality (VR), followed by a conversation. In both scenarios, several participants discuss the positions taken and the moral dilemmas together. The VR intervention uses multiplayer functionality to create social presence. By running a moderated split test on the two scenarios above, this research weighs the effectiveness of an immersive experience against the traditional presentation. The richness of both conversations is analysed using Ahvenharju's (2018) five dimensions of futures consciousness and the LIWC tool (Boyd, 2022). The results offer insight into how immersive technology can contribute to inclusive ethical dialogue and democratic decision-making.