Tech Ethics live in the Gap
AI and Tech ethics are persuasive and influence what we think, feel and believe about the world around us--whether we realize it or not.
It's easy to forget how much technology saturates our existence. It's also easy to forget that technology is persuasive and encodes the ethics, values, beliefs and morals of its creators. That's a recipe for a situation where you marginalize, devalue, or silence whole communities. Worse - you could even be inadvertently harming other people. Tech Ethics shines a light into the gaps, allowing you to be aware of how tech colors your understanding and interaction with the world, and make informed decisions about the technology you use everyday.
At the recommendation of another writer here on Substack, I picked up a copy of “Smart Brevity” from the creators of Politico and Axios. I’m always looking for ways to improve my writing, and the axiom, “Brevity is Confidence, Length is Fear,” really caught my attention.
One of the axioms that the book repeatedly hammers on is defining why your writing matters. They devote an entire chapter to the concept and continue to harp on the point throughout the book. It’s one of those things, as writers, we know we should be thinking about, but it’s easy to lose sight of and lose focus. We can always use the reminder to refocus on why my words matter.
Taking that as inspiration, I asked myself why I wanted to write Byte-Sized Ethics before I tackled why it mattered. How could I expect to define why you, the reader, would want to read my newsletter if I couldn’t explain why I wanted to write the damn thing in the first place.
My first answer to myself was shallow — I believe AI and tech ethics are essential. It was the kind of answer we spout, hoping no one prods us to interrogate more. It wasn’t enough to say that AI and Tech Ethics are important - I had to uncover why.
Why do I believe that AI and tech ethics are essential? My first answer to this question was bullshitt-y, even to me. “Because they are everything,” I said to myself, immediately rolling my eyes at my melodrama. But when I poked at that answer a little more, it did have a nuggety center underneath the bullshit.
AI and Technology are everything because they infuse our lives to the degree that it’s hard to pinpoint precisely where Technology ends and the human begins. Technology has become the hear-silent hum in the background of our lives, so ubiquitous that we forget that it’s there at all. We are all cyborgs, whether we recognize it or not.
Technology has become the hear-silent, pervavsive hum in the background of our lives.
AI and Technology are media, persuasive, and encoded with intention, biases, values, and ethics. Technology grew out of the natural sciences, and as rational humans, we’ve been conditioned to assume that anything from science is truth—free of perspective, bias, and subjectivity. But this is a bald-faced lie. The natural sciences are just as susceptible to bias, racism, bigotry, values, and ethics as anything else humans create — check out the Hottentot Venus to see this in action.
AI and Technology are no different— they aren’t any more neutral and objective than the Hottentot Venus. Developing software is as much art as it is Technology. We tell ourselves that Artificial Intelligence is intelligence without the human, but that human is still there, just obscured. ChatGPT requires an army of semi-skilled professionals, primarily in third-world countries, to review and label the data that powers it. Humans are the proverbial gerbils running on the wheels that power our fantasies about artificial intelligence.
Humans are the proverbial gerbils running on the wheels that power our fantasies about artificial intelligence.
Ultimately, we know software isn’t objective and want software that reflects our ethics, values, and morality. Sometimes, the ethics, values, and morals we encode in the software are apparent. Often, it’s not because ethics live in the gap between what we assume to be true and the messy reality of what is true. But the impact of the ethics encoded is real, even if we don’t see what causes them.
That’s why I want to write Byte-sized Ethics. That’s why what I write matters - to help you, dear reader, to understand the impacts of the ethics in the gap so that you can understand how technology colors your awareness, and allows you to make informed choices about what Technology you use and how you use it.