Tech ethics must vastly improve

Published on September 7, 2016

Frank Kaufmann

(Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Nathan Collins in his Pacific Standard piece Artificial Intelligence Will Be as Biased
and Prejudiced as Its Human Creators identifies a pressing matter of our time,
perhaps the most pressing matter. His short piece gets distracted unfortunately,
surrendering the significance of his important observation to focus instead on
stale treacle about racism.
I leave for the moment, the weary clang of loathing of racism and other popular
insensitivities (as genuinely important as they are) to political opportunists, social
engineers, and bathroom door-sign makers for the moment, so as to carry Mr.
Collins very important observations to more far reaching considerations.
Collins opens his brief piece with this:
The optimism around modern technology lies in part in the belief that its a
democratizing forceone that isnt bound by the petty biases and
prejudices that humans have learned over time.
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This above shocked me awake. Biases (or worse yet, moral failure) written or
inadvertently allowed into emerging technologies is hugely important. It is this
point about tech that is particularly frightening as it looms over us in our time.
Democratizing is unrelated to the decline of bias, but leave that. Not important.
Collins does a most valuable service to catch unwittingly the persistence of an allimportant, unexamined ideological assumption that haunts tech progress, namely
the perpetuation of a gross ideological and philosophical error and impulse that
underlies and permeates the pursuit of ever finer technology.
This error to which I refer is the ideal of value-neutral knowledge. People believe
that tech is neutral. This fantasy (that anything is neutral) is now debunked in the
academy, but tragically it has not been abandoned anywhere else in the general
world at all. This dream of value-neutrality is the siren call of modernism. It is
the errant belief that neutrality is possible (its not), desirable (its not), and
represents the ideal way of knowing and understanding (it does not). Thinkers in
the academy came to realize the folly of this false-utopia toward the end of the
20th century. Non-bias and neutrality are neither possible nor desirable. But this
discovery dawned on thinkers only after they poisoned the ground of social and
public life with the goofy notion that human beings and life in general can be
value-neutral. This is the ideological dna of materialism, namely
facticity,andscientism,which then led normal people to confuse fact with
knowledge, and fact with truth.
In arenas where these issues are debated, this fools gold is called being valueneutral. Conversation revolves around the fact-value split. This direction in
human affairs, follows the trajectory lit most brightly by the radical decline of
sound, reflective, and intellectually critical religious life and thinking, a decline
that began most precipitously starting at the end of the 19th century. This
essential, corrosive error that characterizesmodernism has since been cured (as
I say) in the academy, but almost nowhere else.
The way the academy corrected itself to steer off the hubris-laden chimera of
value-neutral research and writing, was to shift to self-disclosure. Once
scholars realized they were chasing the March Hare in the absurd notion that they
could have no opinions nor biases on things, they shifted to prefacing their
research with honest efforts to help the reader know of and be aware of their
biases, and their views and ideologies that are likely to influence how they
approach, distill, organize, and interpret data.
This genuinely positive awakening allows the reader rescue from the placebo of
thinking that scholars and scientists write about what is. With this correction,
readers could engage experts and participate in the shared effort to know in a
healthy effort to integrate my own views and biases with those of the researchers
from whose hard work I benefit. The problem is that this wise corrective did not
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filter out to common thinking in society at large, neither to its leaders in any field,
nor to the common, conscientious citizen.
It was only upon reading Mr. Collins opening paragraph, that I became jolted to
the frightening awareness that this type of modernism still holds the world in its
trance, and nowhere is that trance more cult-like than in the thrilling, lighteningfast-developing, endless-horizon-dreaming world of technology. Technology,
minute by minute is carrying us into a world of excitement and opportunity. Last
minutes science-fiction is this minutes app thats already too old to be of much
use. The warp-speed train has left the station.
Why is modernisms neutrality-trance over tech frightening? It is because of the
truism that Collins notes in his opening paragraph: Just as we learn our biases
from the world around us, AI will learn its biases from us. This is important not
because weve now produced machines that like white names better than
black names, (though that is a problem), but for reasons far deeper.
Tech is nothing more than extending ourselves to mind-boggling degrees. The
thrill and the promise of tech lies in that it translates everything we want to do,
and everything we can do into a space where a machine, a code, or a device, can
do it millions of times faster, more accurately, more consistently, more precisely,
more powerfully, and more enduringly. Tech is us writ to the nth.
The fear of the singularity that wise and deep tech minds strive to warn us about
is right on. But the worry connected to this onrushing moment is only wise
because of the gross ethical, moral, and spiritual underdevelopment that
characterize the our condition.Our demonic imperfections, our killing of one
another, our raping of one another, our dehumanizing and exploiting one another,
our indifference, our greed, our utilitarianism and our objectifying others for
personal desires, remains unchecked. The institutions once devoted to enhancing
compassion, respect, and the divine in each person are in steep decline, and have
been so for more than a century.
A spiritual force sufficient in genuine ways to the nature of our time is our most
pressing need. We collectively and each one of us needs something that works
through word, charism, and community to check our dark side. This must be
sought collectively in ways that transcend the backward inheritance of religious
and cultural division. This must be sought actively and consciously, and receive
devotion and investment. Our repair, and the diminishing of that dark part of
being human must be organized, encouraged, and embraced. Tech, is not neutral.
It is us writ to the nth. I for one do not want greed, rape, violence, and indifference
writ to the nth.