Purpose – The paper aims to explore future and emerging information and communication technologies. It gives a general overview of the social consequences and ethical issues arising from technologies that can currently be reasonably expected. This overview is used to present recommendations and integrate these in a framework of responsible innovation. Understanding of capabilities of emerging technologies in decentralised and profit-oriented technology development settings is limited to very few individuals. These are normally not in a position to engage with societal consequences in any serious form. Diffusion of technology is mostly left to markets, which makes it difficult if not impossible to foresee which technologies are going to be successful and even more difficult to know what the social consequences of wide-spread use will be. These brief thoughts indicate that a more encompassing approach to addressing consequences of technology development is required. The present paper introduces the ethical issues of emerging ICT applications (ETICA) project that aims to contribute to such a broader understanding of the consequences of emerging technologies.