The Role of Normware in Trustworthy and Explainable AI

For being potentially destructive, in practice incomprehensible and for the most unintelligible, contemporary technology is setting high challenges on our society. New conception methods are urgently required. Reorganizing ideas and discussions presented in AI and related fields, this position paper aims to highlight the importance of normware--that is, computational artifacts specifying norms--with respect to these issues, and argues for its irreducibility with respect to software by making explicit its neglected ecological dimension in the decision-making cycle.