TheMarketForIdeas

The tech evangelists would have us believe that AI will be part of „our daily bread” (in biblical and practical terms) in the Industry 4.0 era. Some will put anything on their sandwich and are quick to try out new technologies and mainstream them if they bring in the profits; others are shaking and shivering simply hearing about it. The providence and peril of new technologies, among which AI is the “queen”, are, how else, unequally distributed. The fatcats and the working stiff, to turn to class depictions, are not equally represented in the spoils of AI. Between organizations and businesses, the ones with visionary and versatile leaders in terms of incorporating AI in production processes will win out against those who are more reticent or rigid. Within the organizations and businesses, AI helps less qualified or productive workers make up some of the gap in productivity compared to the high performers. Until we get to the point where AI will replace either the former (“the useless class”, apud Yuval Noah Harari), or the latter (the underappreciated in “Gresham’s Law”), who knows where we are going?! The researchers are working day and night on the predictions and the explanations.

The efficiency criterion has always had its detractors, since it is largely mute to the question of who and in what conditions can invoke it as an argument for one course of action or another. However, nor the ethics of AI seem to be much more enlightening when it comes to the judgment calls for AI – which is the right/proper/fair frame of analysis? The ethics of virtues, or the ethics of values, or maybe the consequentialist-utilitarian ethics? These credentials, so much looked-for but so hard to align the philosophers themselves, then them with the public, complicate how we discuss, further on, issues related to: the limits of privacy and public surveillance; behaviour manipulation (whether for consumption or voting); the lack of transparency of the utilized algorithms; (in)voluntary biases encapsulated in automated sorting and decision systems; human-machine interactivity (from healthcare to… sexual surrogates), relation between automation and accountability; the treatment of technology as a “moral agent”; and even the spectre of a “singularity” (where AI becomes self-improving and smarter than us, humans, only to proceed devouring us, being sick of our barbarity or banality).

The most intuitive ethical dilemma concerns the way we metabolize AI (and its sister-subject, robotics) in the field of labour. The productivity growth is (also) a result of the lower amount of labour necessary to obtain the same amount of goods and services, though there are second order effects since increased wealth creates new demand and supply down the line. Since classical automation/mechanization replaced “muscle power”, digitalization is doing the same with our “mind power”, and the stressed occupational classes have always been searching for an equalizer. Remember the Luddites declaring war on looms to welfare state bureaucrats, (self)invited to orchestrate “just transitions” (in EU parlance, both green and digital). Another equalizer might be the force of the guild bringing political pressure to bear on regulating the use of AI in their field to prevent job loss by motivating the maintenance of key accountability and competencies (such as doctors and lawyers). Governments already have a lot on their plate in a congenitally anarchic cyberspace, amenable to both freedom and criminality, with fierce oligopolistic competition between IT&C actors with critical immaterial assets.

These ethical discussions are supposedly setting the stage for “good governance” or “good regulation” (whether inside or outside our reference ecosystem). Arguments “from authority” – in fact, “from power” – are those which will win out over the philosophers. Policies on technology can take different forms, from financial incentives to fiscal burdens, to the creation of infrastructure, to declarations of intent and voluntary guidelines from industry, and all the way to full-blown legislation. As always, there will be compliance, or the miming of it („mere talking” and „ethics washing”) or maybe even proscription (all the way to the Dark Side/Web). Everything is happening under a cloud of ethical incantations accompanying the interaction between the new technologies and other domains, some less obvious than others: for instance, the ethics of business (a true oxymoron for some), the ethics of politics/governments (a cynical joke for others), or the ethics of education and, especially, that of scientific research. The latter was already suffering from the chronic illnesses it abundantly inherited from the “analogue age” – such as plagiarism, conflicts of interest and good old fashioned con-artistry.