The Philosophy Section of the University of Twente in the Netherlands is looking for a postdoc (approx. 20-month position) in ethics of autonomous vehicles, with special attention to ethical analysis of human factors in trust in autonomous vehicle, This is part of a large European project on ethics of emerging technologies.

The principal aim of this postdoc will be to develop ethical guidance tools for the assessment of trust in autonomous vehicles, to help engineers, designers, regulators, civil society organizations, and researchers in assessing the trustworthiness of autonomous vehicles, and of different components and elements in autonomous vehicle systems. This will involve, amongst others, the development of a ‘trust relationship tool’ that allows actors to identify trust relationships that exist, or are likely to emerge, between key stakeholders in autonomous vehicle systems. This tool will complement technical assessments of trust in autonomous vehicles by looking at human and social factors in trust.
This postdoc project will also develop a novel approach to the ethical assessment and guidance of autonomous vehicle systems, which will build in part on the above mentioned tools. Autonomous vehicles, and the social-technical systems that support them, must factor in values like privacy, explicability, and human agency in addition to values like human safety, efficiency and so on. The postdoc will draw from an Ethics by Design approach to show how values like privacy, explicability, and human agency can increase the overall trustworthiness of a particular system. In seeking to make an autonomous vehicle system trustworthy, it must take into account a range of different values, and may need to make tradeoffs between these values. The postdoc will work closely with other members on the project to see how technical aspects of trust are being built into the system, and to what this means for developing a system that is worthy of human and social trust.
Additional time will be devoted to project coordination and research dissemination tasks. This will involve writing reports for the project (often together with others), and you will also have some time to work on academic publications.
The CONNECT Project
The CONNECT Project for Continuous and Efficient Cooperative Trust Management for Resilient Cooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM) is a prestigious three year project international project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program. It has a budget of €6 million, and will start in September 2022. It has 17 participating institutions, including the University of Twente. The project is led by the Technikon Forschungs- Und Planungsgesellschaft MBH in Austria.

Your application should include:

a cover letter which explains your interest in the position and your qualifications for it;
a curriculum vitae which includes the name and e-mail address/telephone number for at least two references.
a writing sample (preferably a published article related to the position);
either a summary and table of contents of your dissertation or the entire dissertation.

The application deadline is July 1, 2022. Interviews will be held about one week after this date.