Potential Abuse of Tech usage

• China is experimenting with a social rating system, like a credit rating, except it rates whether or not you are a good person. (Location 115)

Problem of Tech industry

Lean startup, tech’s predominant ideology today, is vehemently empirical. It argues that we’re so swept up in change it’s futile to predict the future; instead, we should prioritise validation over research and learn through making. Build, measure, learn, repeat. (Location 161)

Is technology neutral?

• This instrumentalist stance argues technology is just a tool, one that people can use for good or misuse for harm. (Location 183)
• technological determinism – argues that technology is anything but neutral; instead, it’s so powerful that it moulds society and culture, acting more as our master than our servant. Determinism pervades both science fiction and academia (Location 188)
  • Dilemma: Technologists often describe their lofty goals with deterministic language – Democratise! Transform! Disrupt! – but fall back on instrumentalist defences to ethical issues: we truly regret this disturbing case, but we can’t be held liable for misuse. (Location 194)
• mediation theory – that neatly melds the competing views of instrumentalism and determinism.4 For Verbeek, technology is a medium through which we perceive and manipulate our world. Glasses help us see and understand our environments; hammers help us build shelters and sculptures; cameras (Location 202)

  • humans and technologies co-create the world. (Location 207)

    You see, the beautiful music coming out of the violin did not come from the instrument, the hardware, alone; it depended upon the human element, the software. (Location 210)

  • Design is applied ethics. Sometimes this connection is obvious: if you design razor wire, you’re saying that anyone who tries to contravene someone else’s right to private property should be injured. (Location 227)

  • Design changes how we see the world and how we can act within it; design turns beliefs about how we should live into objects and environments people will use and inhabit. In choosing the future they want, designers discard dozens of alternative realities, which pop briefly into existence through prototypes or sketches, but perish in the recycling bin. As one memorable quote proclaims, ‘Ethics is the aesthetics of the future.’ (Location 229)

Problem of free market idea for technology

• some people claim ethics doesn’t belong in industry, and that acceptable behaviour is for the market or the law to decide. This is a political idea, and its weaknesses should be clear to anyone who disputes its libertarian premise. A market that ethically self-corrects requires perfect information and full agreement on what’s right and wrong. Customers can only punish ethical overreach if they know and understand what companies are doing, and if they agree it’s unethical. (Location 234)

Objection to ethics

• The second common objection to business ethics is that it will hamper innovation. Sometimes that’s true. (Location 243)
  • NGO ppl move soooo slow

Morality is individualistic

The breadth of human opinion is reflected in the complexity of ethics; people’s moral views tend to inform their political views, and vice versa. Those on the left might favour moral stances that prioritise social good, while those on the right may prefer perspectives that support individual sovereignty and autonomy. (Location 262)

Tech ethics will always be there

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress. (Location 294)

Reasons of bias from ML

• AI ethicist Joanna Bryson claims algorithmic bias has three primary causes.9 The first is poor training data. Data that’s incomplete, unrepresentative, or improperly cleaned will always cause algorithmic blind spots. A facial recognition system trained only on white faces is guaranteed to be racist. This isn’t just inconvenient, it’s degrading: failing to recognise a face is failing to recognise someone’s humanity. (Location 361)