When Google fired ethicists around 2020 it was loud. Not even a pandemic masked it. The act resonates to today. Yet still not loud enough. In the year of the world 2023: when Microsoft recently performed a similar act: is it resonating as loudly?

Voices utter that ethics are needed (with or without teeth). Acts to the contrary are muting, as questionable and confabulating tech-iterations are brought to market.

If “Ethics is a mediator between humans and their environment, making sure that some kind of balance is maintained,” [*] and I tend to agree, then mediation is needing support, while balance was questionably there from the start.

We can not speak of balance without blushing if systemic issues at the base are not increasingly brought into question. For ethics to work, foundations (and not only technological issues at foundational levels) must be critically assessed, acted upon, overhauled, refined, augmented, diversified and nuanced. Though an instant and immediate orchestration thereof might be more utopian than pragmatic.

In the least (the very, very least), it might be refreshing to revisit several examples of such multidimensional foundational issues by reflection on, and action in support of that and they mentioned in:

Hao, K. (2021). The Fight to Reclaim AI. MIT Technology Review, 124(4), 48–52: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/14/1026148/ai-big-tech-timnit-gebru-paper-ethics/ : “These changes that we’re fighting for—it’s not just for marginalized groups,… It’s actually for everyone.” (Prof. Rediet Abebe on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rediet_Abebe)

and then indeed far from only designers, from within an overly-hyped and hyper-financed niche, must be “aware of… different populations… and their values and cultural backgrounds.” [*]

Following, if that highly dominating minority of designer-brothers would dare, they then might want to peruse:

Eddo-Lodge, Reni. (2017). Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Bloomsbury Publishing. https://renieddolodge.co.uk/

Just as in medical research, demographically homogeneous sample groups are not conducive to the pluralist nature of, well, nature. Nor is such less valid or reliable methodology conducive to societies, human idiosyncrasies, human relations, and, diversified innovation in the field of AI (this latter which is very much super-ficially collapsed into the one to rule them all: Deep Learning).

The “balance,” as it stands now, is as such artificial, narrow, not representative & thus, tautologically, unnaturally man-made.

…et tu, ethos?

References

[*] The Global AI Ethics Institute. IN: Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/posts/swiss-institute-for-disruptive-innovation_interview-activity-7042071219067584512-H8AV?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

universe.wiki. (2023, March 1). Aco Momcilovic and Emmanuel Goffi in studying Ethics for Artificial Intelligence. https://universe.wiki/2023/03/01/aco-momcilovic-and-emmanuel-goffi-in-studying-an-ethics-for-artificial-intlligence/ The Global AI Ethics Institute. is an international not-for-profit think tank aiming at promoting cultural diversity in the field of ethics applied to AI (EA2AI) : https://sidi-international.org/

A Mini-Bibliography (very much not complete):

Benjamin, Ruha. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity.

Eubanks, Virginia.(2018). Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St. Martin’s Press.

Kendi, Ibram X. (2019). How To Be an Antiracist. Bodley Head.

McIlwain, Charlton D. (2020). Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. OUP.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. The NYU Press.

O’Neil, Cathy. (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown.

Pérez, Caroline Criado. (2019). Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Abrams Press. (2020: Vintage)

The Radical AI Principles (perhaps “radical” might be influenced by the so-called “inclusiveness” at the *periphery* of a normalized ethical action?):

https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf

The Combahee River Collective Statement: https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf

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