The Role of Ethics in Modern Technology

Hello everyone :handshake: :handshake:

I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between ethics and technology; how new technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence contradict our moral principles.

Are conventional ethical theories still relevant in this situation, in your opinion, do we need to create new ethical frameworks to deal with these developments? Your opinions on whether ethics should govern technology and if we should allow innovation take its course are much appreciated.

Thanks :innocent:

Welcome to ILP :smiley: :+1:

Good question about technology and ethics. Really, technology itself is beyond ethics, it doesn’t limit itself or shape itself based on right and wrong. The proverbial double-edged sword, it will be used for good and bad.

If we think about ethics in terms of culture, then we realize that in a significant way culture is already downstream from technological development. Whatever new tech is being created and disseminated into society is going to have a big impact on cultural norms and values, if not right away then certainly in the long run. This in turn shifts our ideas about ethics. This realization has been connected with entropy in the following way: as technological progress continues to multiply labor-value more and more, allowing the average person working a job to produce many times more value than he otherwise could without modern technologies, this allows for less actual work to be done yet remaining at the same level of economic progress. In other words, some of the economic benefits from technological progress go into increased productivity but some also goes into reducing the amount of real work people do. People slack off more and work less hours. We give more to the machines. This includes intellectual work as well as physical work.

So there is something like a curve of progress, it is not a linear growth upward. The more technology increases overall productivity the more the average worker loses some of their work ethic and drive. This is further pushed in that direction by how technology also increases possibilities for pleasurable leisure time – think Netflix and chill, or how many people today have gaming or pron or social media addiction.

So how are ethics impacted by all of that? Technology pushes society in a ā€˜progressive’ direction, as we see it historically moving left-ward or at least toward neoliberal globalized capitalism and mass consoomerism. People increasingly become objects manipulated by advertising and marketing campaigns, their value in how much they can purchase to keep the system going and continuing to enrich those at the top. Of course now it’s even worse, we are also turned into objects and used for our data, literally data-mined at our own expense and this is perfectly allowable under the law. So right there you have an example of how the ethical understanding of privacy at least in a legal sense have all but collapsed as a consequence of modern technologies. They can slap 100 pages of tiny fine-print legalises and tell you to click Accept, otherwise you can’t play your game or login to your tiktok account, so everyone just clicks accept. Giving away their right to privacy completely. And not even caring.

Or think too about modern computers and smart phones/tablets. They all have a camera watching you as you use it. You think that camera isn’t monitoring you against your knowledge? Sure many of the devices are supposed to display a light next to the camera when in use, but you seriously think it’s not also being turned on without you using it? Think about this: if they can turn on your microphone 24/7 and listen to everything you say because that is being used to feed customized ads to you (and everyone by now knows this is occurring) what makes you think they also can’t turn on your camera for the same reason?

Then remember the book 1984 and think about the developing parallels in our modern world, all thanks to new technologies and how they have atrophied our ethical sensitivities. We really do not care anymore if we are being watched, oh sure we might not like it but are we going to give up our devices because of it? Hell no. We learned this about ourselves back when Snowden revealed that all emails were being intercepted and recorded by the federal government’s spy agencies, but did anyone stop using email because of this? Nope.

So to answer your question, I suppose conventional ethical theories are not at all adequate to the modern situation of technological progress, simply because technology erodes our ethical understanding and our will to uphold right and wrong. Technology makes us lazier and more hedonistic, it directly feeds those parts of ourselves. Of course technology does a lot of great things too, but this side of it cannot be ignored.

It would be great for a new ethical theory to be developed that fully takes into consideration new technologies, but if that were to occur I am guessing it would be some sort of transhumanism urging humans to merge with the machine. People like Elon Musk are already advocating for that and working on how to make it happen, in his own words the goal of the Neuralink project is to merge humans and AI. HIs own words. But of course until that happens he is content to have it used to help cure a few neurological diseases here and there.

How did ā€œethicsā€ get into our programming? What/who is DNA in the image of? If it requires choice, is it not a technic?

Make sure our tools/moderations pivot self=other (recognize personhood, versus violate consent)… and we’re good to go.