Future Ethics

The Incredible Machine, ‘Transparent Charging Station’. Reprinted by kind permission.

For some people, a fair algorithm is one that reflects today’s society. For others, a fair algorithm must be an agent of social change.

Ethics should be about living our best lives, not seeing how low we can sink. And

According to the law of unintended consequences, there will always be outcomes we overlook, but unintended does not mean unforeseeable. We can – and must – try to anticipate and mitigate the worst potential consequences.

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.

It is not enough for a virtuous person to intellectually grasp her moral duty to extend compassion, or even to understand that it would be irrational not to do so. We must also find ways to feel compassion, which is an experience that goes beyond the intellect. —Shannon Vallor22

bias. Discrimination is already interwoven in the fabric of our tools and datasets.

Data always looks backward, meaning historical prejudice is frozen into a training corpus.

Unintended consequences affect familiar people in unknown ways, while externalities happen to people we’ve ignored. In other words, we overlook unintended consequences by not looking deeply enough, but we miss externalities because we were looking in the wrong places.