Technical Debt & Ethical Debt

Technical Debt - A software development term referring to the cost of choosing fast solutions now and putting off fixing issues until a future time. The benefit of a rush to market is matched with a hope that bugs will be found later, and repairs made. It can result from limited testing during the development process.

Ethical Debt - The result of not considering societal harms and unintended consequences. This can happen in the fast-moving production of AI tools. The people who incur it are rarely the people who ultimately pay for it.

More AI definitions here.

15 Articles about the Ethics of AI

Generative AI Is a (ethical) Disaster, and Companies Don’t Seem to Really Care – Vice  

Artificial Intelligence comes with risks. How can companies develop AI responsibly? - NPR

USC Invests $1 Billion in New Computing School to Teach Ethical AI Use - dot.LA

The Green Glass Approach to Responsible AI – Expert AI

AI is acting ‘pro-anorexia’ and tech companies aren’t stopping it – Washington Post

Pope Francis: AI should be used in a responsible and ethical way – Market Watch

For artificial intelligence to thrive, it must explain itself - Economist

Colonizing Art – Openmind Mag

AI operations create a huge carbon footprint and often rely on low-paid workers in developing countries. Some professors and students may decide it’s ethically questionable to use these tools. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

Leading companies including Anthropic and Google DeepMind are creating “AI constitutions”—a set of values and principles that their models can adhere to, in an effort to prevent abuses. – Artechnica

The ethics of AI-powered marketing technology – Mark Tech

Ethical considerations in the use of AI – Reuters

Answering AI’s biggest questions requires an interdisciplinary approach – Tech Crunch

OpenAI's 'unreasonable claims' exhaust AI-ethics researchers – Insider

Generative AI Is Making Companies Even More Thirsty for Your Data – Wired

7 articles about AI & Ethics

Can AI chatbots like ChatGPT help us make ethical decisions rationally? - Vox

Amazon created an AI resume-reading software and worked on this project for two years, trying various kinds of bias-mitigation techniques. And at the end of the day, they couldn’t sufficiently de-bias it, and so they threw it out.  - CNN

Teaching AI Ethics - Leon Furze Blog

People Using Generative AI ChatGPT Are Instinctively Making This AI Rookie Mistake, A Vexing Recipe For AI Ethics And AI Law - Forbes

Online mental health company uses ChatGPT to help respond to users in experiment — raising ethical concerns around healthcare and AI technology - Business Insider

When AI Overrules the Nurses Caring for You - Wall Street Journal 

A.I. Is Becoming More Conversant. But Will It Get More Honest? - New York Times

Yes, you need data scientists and data engineers. You need those tech people. You also need people like sociologists, attorneys, especially civil rights attorneys, and people from risk. You need that cross-functional expertise because solving or mitigating bias in AI is not something that can just be left in the technologists’ hands. - CNN

6 Ethical Questions to Think about if you use Generative AI

1. The image below recently won one of the world’s most prestigious photography competitions.

The artist said it was “co-produced by the means of AI (artificial intelligence) image generators.” He wrote, “Just as photography replaced painting in the reproduction of reality, AI will replace photography. Don’t be afraid of the future. It will just be more obvious that our mind always created the world that makes it suffer.”

Do you agree? What role should AI have in the creation of images, not only in contests but by those producing media for companies, schools, and even churches?

2. If a painting, song, novel or movie that you love was generated by an AI, would you want to know? Would it change your reaction if you knew the creator was a machine?  

3. Would it be ethical for a chatbot to write a PhD thesis, as long as the student looks over and makes refinements to the work? What percent of rewriting would be the minimum to make this acceptable?

4. Is it OK for AI to brainstorm ideas for projects or products that you later claim as your own? Would it change your answer if you came up with the original question? What if you fine-tuned some of the ideas? What if you give the AI some credit for helping you?

5. If you use AI and it plagiarizes an artist or writer, who should be blamed? Would your answer change if you were not aware the AI had committed the plagiarism? How might you prove that you were unaware?

6. How do you draw the ethical line for using a chatbot like ChatGPT? Would it be OK for writing an email to schedule a meeting? A sales pitch to a client? A religious sermon? A conversation in an online dating app? A letter to a friend going through depression?

There are more ethical questions for AI in this Wall Street Journal Article

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Make Design More Inclusive: Defeat Unconscious Bias in Visuals

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Cultural Relativism

Recognizing the importance of our social environment in generating customs and beliefs, many people suppose that ethical relativism is the correct metaethical theory. Furthermore, they are drawn to it for its liberal philosophical stance. It seems to be an enlightened response to the sin of ethnocentricity, and it seems to entail or strongly imply an attitude of tolerance toward other cultures. 

Tolerance is certainly a virtue, but is this a good argument for it? I think not. If morality is relative to each culture, then if the culture in question does not have a principle of tolerance, its members have no obligation to be tolerant. 

Not only do relativists fail to offer a basis for criticizing those who are intolerant, they cannot rationally criticize anyone who espouses what they might regard as a heinous principle. Relativists cannot morally criticize anyone outside their own culture. Adolf Hitler’s genocidal actions, as long as they are culturally accepted, are as morally legitimate as Mother Teresa’s work of mercy. 

There are other disturbing consequences of ethical relativism. It seems to entail that reformers are always (morally) wrong since they go against the tide of cultural standards. William Wilberforce was wrong in the eighteenth Century to oppose slavery, the British were immoral in opposing the burning of widows in India. 

There is an even more basic problem with the notion that morality is dependent on cultural acceptance for its validity. The problem is that of culture or society is notoriously difficult to define. This is especially true in a pluralistic society like our own where the notion seems to be vague with unclear boundaries. 

One person may belong to several societies (subcultures).. if Mary is a US citizen and a member of the Roman Catholic church, she is wrong if she chooses to have an abortion and not-wrong if she acts against the teaching of the church on abortion. 

This moral Babel.. has lost its action-guiding function. 

Louis Pojman, Ethical Theory

The Standard

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. 

Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something-some Real Morality--for them to be true about. 

If the Rule of Decent Behaviour meant simply 'whatever each nation happens to approve,' there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the world could ever grow morally better or morally worse.

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

When Company Values Falter

When we talk about cases of clear fraud or criminal misdoing, it seems so easy to say, “What was wrong with these evil people?” But when they’re in the moment, they’re saying to themselves, “I have to do things for these investors” or “I have to do things for my employees to keep things going.” It’s the concept of escalation of commitment; at first you had very small things that would get covered up and justified, but then the amount of deception gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Theranos might be a good example of this. The people who founded that company had good intentions, right? They wanted to develop medical testing and products that would benefit the world. They believed in it. And either for the mission, for the long-term viability of the company, or for the employees, you can see how they end up making mistakes and unethical actions even though they began with good intentions.

Ken Shotts quoted in Fast Company

The First CRISPR baby

Eventually, a CRISPR baby will be born.* The (new gene-editing) technology is too easy. There is no world government to stop its use; many argue no one should do so anyway. At the point that baby emerges, perhaps modified to evade a particular disease or perhaps even to look a particular way, theoretical debates will become real. 

 Jennifer Doudna knows the influence she and her fellow scientists have is diminishing every day. “I would hope this would be used to create cures, to help people,” she says. Even if the technology is not quite there yet, CRISPR could eventually do plenty else besides. Every week a new paper is published finding more genes that influence looks, intelligence, stamina, even sexuality. 

“The dystopic view would be IVF clinics that offer parents a menu of options for kids,” she says. “Nobody has kids by sex anymore. You go to a clinic, pick from a menu, say, ‘I want my kid to be this tall, have this colour of eye, this level of IQ,’ and all those sorts of things. I think that would be terrible.” 

Tom Whipple writing in 1843 magazine 

*Chinese scientists are creating CRISPR babies  MIT Technology Review 

you can't opt out of life

Imagine that three people see a twenty-dollar bill on the front seat of an unlocked car. Each person walks past and leave the cash there. Why? The first person wanted to take the money but passed up the opportunity for fear of punishment if caught in the act. The second rejected the temptation out of a conviction that God makes certain rules that people are to follow, and one of those rules is that we shouldn’t take things that don’t belong to us. The third refrained from taking the money because of empathy—awareness of how frustrated and angry she herself would be if some of her money were stolen.

The action is the same for each individual—no one took the money. But people do things for reasons and the reasons behind the same action in the case above vary significantly. The bumper-sticker-sized version of the first person’s ethics is “Whatever you do, don’t get caught,” while that of the second person is “Thou shall not steal.” The final persona builds her morality around “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” These different reasons grow out of differences in theories about what constitutes right behavior.

Though none of the three people may have been immediately conscious of these theories at work, the theories were there, and they guided each person’s behavior.

Also consider the motives or the reasons behind the action.

Why they did what they did—the theoretical basis of their actions—is significant.

The reality is we must make decisions about the ethical issues confronting us, and we must have a theoretical foundations on which to build and evaluate these decisions.

In other words, the issue is not whether we have a theory, but whether we are conscious of the theory we do have and believe it is the best available guide for our life. We do not choose to be ethicists; we cannot opt out of that. The real question is whether we are going to be good ethicists.

Steve Wilkens, Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics

Bumper Sticker Catch Phrases

We need to be careful about staking the important ethical decisions in our lives on bumper sticker catch phrases. The problem is that the ideas expressed in these bite-sized pronouncements have broader implications.

While the ethical aspect that is explicit in the bumper sticker may look good at first glance, other ideas that follow from it may not be so attractive. Most of us have heard or used the cliché “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” and it can sound like worthwhile advice. But what if the standard practices of the “Romans” stand in direct conflict with your moral or religious convictions? The is why we need to get behind the cliché’ itself.

Before we commit ourselves to any bumper sticker, we want to make certain that we can accept all that is implied in the slogan.

Steve Wilkens, Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics