As a group of technology professionals who care about ethics, we are not trying to find a utopia that can’t exist — but not having a perfect answer to our thorny problems is not an excuse to throw up our hands and do nothing. “Complicity is the resting state of adulthood.” Learning, thinking, and engaging in discussions about ethics should be morally ”caffeinating“, stimulating for future action.
- Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” 1973.
We approach this not from a utilitarian context (i.e., the trolley problem, The Good Place) as it is traditionally considered, but within the context of our industry. Are “the ones who walk away from Omelas” heroes or cowards? Are those who stay and advocate for better “activists”? What about choosing the dictitatorial path to free the child yourself? Can anyone actually walk away? What are we walking away from?
Consider rejecting the premise of the question before even considering your answer to the question.
You should lose sleep at night when you hesitate between answering what you should do and what you would do.
- Kristof, Nicholas. “We Are a Nation of Child Abusers.” The New York Times, 3 Feb 2021.
- James, William. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy: Human Immortality, 1956, p. 185.
- Hirschman, Albert O. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. 2007.
- “Two Cultures” by C. P. Snow (The Rede Lecture, 1959)
- “Feynman’s Error: On Ethical Thinking and Drifting” by Dan Munro (Dan’s blog, November 2018)
- “Optimize What?" by Jimmy Wu
- “Solving for Pattern” by Wendell Berry (Chapter 9 in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural, North Point Press, 1981)
- Partnership on AI Tenets
- “Of Course Congress Is Clueless About Tech—It Killed Its Tutor” (WIRED, 2016)
- “Data Science as Political Action: Grounding Data Science in a Politics of Justice” by Ben Green (2019)