When we talk about the ethics of tech, a lot of people flock to things like the trolley problem. This is utterly irrelevant.
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Tech works really hard to try to craft ethical dilemmas that don't exist in the real world. This is because it wants to derail.
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Ethical dilemmas--which arise when two valid ethical frameworks collide--are relatively rare. Tech doesn't have many of these.
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Instead, what it has is "profit vs. ethics". "We will make less money if we act ethically." But revenue is not an ethical concern!
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The tech industry just has a lack of ethics. That's it. And lots of folks trying to craft a trolley problem to mask their accountability.
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In fields that also address this problem, such as medicine, we approach ethical concerns with various tools: review boards, certifications
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A lawyer can get disbarred, a doctor can lose their board certification, a professor can lose research funding.
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Tell me: where is the equivalent of that in tech?
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So when I talk about needing to teach ethics, what I refer to is training by case study on the importance of accountability.
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And not some philosophical gibberish that someone will try to throw lambda calculus at. Ethics isn't a field to solve.
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It's like growing crops: you have to keep doing it, keep learning, because there's never a time we don't need them.
End of conversation
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