Quotes are a bad habit, in written text as much as in air quotes, but in this case, they are deserved. What Google, Amazon, Facebook & Co discuss these days is not ethics. It’s “ethics”.
The discussion around “ethics” in technology is mostly smoke. The rest is mirrors. There is this expectation of a specialist coming in, the ethicist, the tech ethicist, the AI ethicist, or the design ethicist, that will tell these companies how to be better. The ethicist will solve their ethical dilemmas, logically, with a set of algorithmic rules, and then the corporations will be able to decide which rules their code or “AI” should follow—or not.
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There is no point discussing “ethics”, if, in the end, all you believe in is cash and power, if everything you are motivated to do is geared towards increasing your user base and your ROI. There is no point other than bullshitting the public. It’s a theatre.
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It’s an IQ-humming Stanford, MIT, and Cornell territory full of well-read, tattooed, super tolerant cool people, concerned with topics like global warming, diversity and sexual or racial discrimination. The tiny micro-irresponsibilities of these nice smart cool people summed up through the organizations into a gigantic Godzilla that tramples all over the planet. But individually they’re totally fine. And when their Godzilla screams, they feel micro-sorry.
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