I was speaking with a colleague the other day, and we were all doom-and-gloom about how more and more people are trusting the black box of AI to tell them what is true and what is not.
Though provoking ideas. Few things came to mind. Asking people to be more ethical reminded me of asking for good intentions. Without a mechanism, it simply rarely works because incentives often point toward the opposite direction. Thats why we do operational readiness reviews too.. asking engineers to build more reliable systems while asking them to do it fast is pushing good intentions towards a tradeoff they aren’t able to do. Should ethics be part of a similar approach ? Ethical Readiness Review…as an ongoing conversation? But who should be at the table?
In order to avoid discussion on how to bring ethics to people or tech - I just assume IF such method exists, THEN it should be applied to people, early on, instead of tech.
But addressing that topic that you brought up - I think trying to optimize for “ethics” is like trying to optimize for “closed tickets” - there’s no single metric that can be optimized. In fact, I think it should emerge if the we invest into things like - education, science, interest IN science, studying philosophy, studying different cultures and religions…
Every culture, religion, area of the world, family, person - all for different versions of “ethics” - but I do think that there are universal things too (don’t harm children, collaboration is better, diverse opinions are better than uniform, etc). And they emerge only with investing into those things. (Just like in an organisation I guess, if you invest in observability, code quality, …, … the “resilience” will emerge?…)
So if we invest in those things, it’s like those fundamental things have no other way than to establish themselves.
Even if you would create by working from you highest ethical and morals standards - you never might forsee what corrupt minds are capable of using it and develop it further. Sometimes the only ethically justifiable decision would be to halt the development process at an early stage. But mankind's curiosity rules that out from the start.
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” --Albert Einstein, May 1946
I agree with the premise that technology is a mirror of its creator, but I want to offer another perspective. Ethics is a social construct within a certain period of time. What was ethical 100 years ago is not now, and what is now will not be in 20 years. It is also very different from culture to culture. We humans are quite egocentric and tend to examine ethics, laws, norms, and other constructs from our own point of view and based on models created for us in the past, maybe not so distant but relevant to the culture and time when they were created. All the rest seems to us as deviation. I suggest then, looking at those constructs as trajectories rather than snapshots.
Thanks! I can see your point, this is why every previous generation feels that “things have changed for worse”, and this is exactly why I don’t want to examine what is “ethics” - it’s very individual, from nationality, to region, to individual family and that individual person’s journey. But even more awkward for me is hearing that we try to control technology within that premise. After the fact. If there are “universal” morality points, ethical constructs, then they should be cultivated in people, not mandated on tech…
The Aristotle reference earns its place here. Habituation - ethics as craft, not lecture - gives you a way of describing why compliance frameworks feel hollow without sounding cynical about regulation. The insight running through your argument: you can't write a checklist that substitutes for the thousand micro-decisions a practitioner makes. That's why the ethics has to be pre-installed. I wrote last week about foreseeability as a legal standard for harm - your essay asks the right prior question.
Though provoking ideas. Few things came to mind. Asking people to be more ethical reminded me of asking for good intentions. Without a mechanism, it simply rarely works because incentives often point toward the opposite direction. Thats why we do operational readiness reviews too.. asking engineers to build more reliable systems while asking them to do it fast is pushing good intentions towards a tradeoff they aren’t able to do. Should ethics be part of a similar approach ? Ethical Readiness Review…as an ongoing conversation? But who should be at the table?
In order to avoid discussion on how to bring ethics to people or tech - I just assume IF such method exists, THEN it should be applied to people, early on, instead of tech.
But addressing that topic that you brought up - I think trying to optimize for “ethics” is like trying to optimize for “closed tickets” - there’s no single metric that can be optimized. In fact, I think it should emerge if the we invest into things like - education, science, interest IN science, studying philosophy, studying different cultures and religions…
Every culture, religion, area of the world, family, person - all for different versions of “ethics” - but I do think that there are universal things too (don’t harm children, collaboration is better, diverse opinions are better than uniform, etc). And they emerge only with investing into those things. (Just like in an organisation I guess, if you invest in observability, code quality, …, … the “resilience” will emerge?…)
So if we invest in those things, it’s like those fundamental things have no other way than to establish themselves.
Even if you would create by working from you highest ethical and morals standards - you never might forsee what corrupt minds are capable of using it and develop it further. Sometimes the only ethically justifiable decision would be to halt the development process at an early stage. But mankind's curiosity rules that out from the start.
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” --Albert Einstein, May 1946
“But mankind's curiosity rules that out from the start.” - for sure, that’s something we have built-in and has been the driver for progress
I agree with the premise that technology is a mirror of its creator, but I want to offer another perspective. Ethics is a social construct within a certain period of time. What was ethical 100 years ago is not now, and what is now will not be in 20 years. It is also very different from culture to culture. We humans are quite egocentric and tend to examine ethics, laws, norms, and other constructs from our own point of view and based on models created for us in the past, maybe not so distant but relevant to the culture and time when they were created. All the rest seems to us as deviation. I suggest then, looking at those constructs as trajectories rather than snapshots.
Thanks! I can see your point, this is why every previous generation feels that “things have changed for worse”, and this is exactly why I don’t want to examine what is “ethics” - it’s very individual, from nationality, to region, to individual family and that individual person’s journey. But even more awkward for me is hearing that we try to control technology within that premise. After the fact. If there are “universal” morality points, ethical constructs, then they should be cultivated in people, not mandated on tech…
The Aristotle reference earns its place here. Habituation - ethics as craft, not lecture - gives you a way of describing why compliance frameworks feel hollow without sounding cynical about regulation. The insight running through your argument: you can't write a checklist that substitutes for the thousand micro-decisions a practitioner makes. That's why the ethics has to be pre-installed. I wrote last week about foreseeability as a legal standard for harm - your essay asks the right prior question.