The Ethical Technologist: Giving technologists an ethical mind-set

If technology is powerful and pervasive, how can we make sure it remains friendly? After all, it is here to stay. We could not get rid of it, even if we wanted to. We need ethical technologists who understand the true nature of technology, beyond the clichéd images and whiz-bangery.

Toolmakers, par excellence

Going back millions of years, humans have excelled as tool-makers. Our information technology is perhaps our finest tool-set, though by no means our only tool-set. More than just inanimate objects though, information technology is an extension of our mind. Technology lets us extend our ability to think and process information beyond our biological brain, out into the environment.

This ability to extend our minds into our tools did not begin with information technology. We have always done this. Andy Clark, a respected cognitive scientist reports that brain scans show that if you were to pick up, for example, a garden rake and start to use it to gather leaves, within a short time your brain would have mapped the tines of the rake to be extensions of your hands. We call it haptic touch.

The computers that we have come to depend on are just another tool that we project our minds into and use to outsource some of our thinking tasks. If you doubt this, imagine if you lost your personal computer. In some ways, it would be like having a stroke. Part of your brain would have disappeared, and you would very much feel the lack of it. You might feel lost and debilitated until a replacement is found, complete with restored data.

So people have a closer relationship to information technology than is commonly realised, having become an extension of our biological mind. As millions of extended minds have reached out and merged with each other we can observe a remarkable phenomenon, the formation of a new layer of consciousness in the world.

Welcome to the Noosphere

The French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin foreshadowed the Internet as far back as the 1930's. In his book The Phenomenon of Man published after his death in 1955, Teilhard describes humankind as the evolutionary process of life on Earth becoming conscious of itself. The generation and exchange of ideas between people over time created a collective memory that enhanced human consciousness to the point where a thinking layer was created that enveloped the earth. He called this the noosphere after the Greek for mind. The noosphere is an extension of the biosphere, which is itself founded upon the geosphere.

As Kevin Kelly, Founding Editor of Wired Magazine pointed out in 2007, the Internet is a neural network that approximates the human brain in complexity. I'm about to quote some very big numbers. The Internet has around 55 thousand billion links, about same number of synapses in the brain. There is about the same number of transistors as neurones (one quintillion, that's a one with 18 zeroes behind it). They both have about the same amount of data storage capacity (255 billion gigabytes) and everything is firing at roughly the same frequency as each other. We can make a valid if rough comparison between one human brain and the Internet of 2007.

But the human brain is not doubling in capacity every two years. The dimensions of the Internet cited here will have doubled for every two years from 2007. Kelly predicts that by 2040, the total processing power of the Internet will exceed that of six billion human brains. One might say that Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere is alive and well and growing at a phenomenal rate. The noosphere is one explanation for how it is that ideas and inventions seem to occur spontaneously to people in different parts of the world at the same time but with no contact with each other. The history of innovation is rich with such examples.

One cannot mention this tantalising future without trying to characterise it. What will the Internet of the future be like? It will be smarter than it is now. Artificial intelligence is being built into it by major movers and shakers like Google. Each person who uses the web will be known by it, at least to some extent. The person's likes and dislikes will be known and catered for by so-called intelligent agents. These agents are semi-autonomous software programs that can move about the Internet doing things for you. An electronic personal assistant. These agents might be embodied into something pleasing to our eye and made to be comfortable to be with.

The Internet of the future will be pervasive, some might say ubiquitous. Everyday objects in our world will have web-ness built into them in the form of computer chips and these will be in communication with the Internet.

We are likely to become more and dependent on the Internet too. After all, as Andy Clark points out, our technology is an extension of ourselves, of our biological brain. We instinctively outsource thinking tasks into these external thinking devices and the Internet will have become one enormous thinking device.

Orwell's 1984

This vision of the future may be alarming to some people. It sounds too much like the Big Brother of George Orwell's 1984. That nightmare did not eventuate, thanks partly to Orwell's brilliant articulation of the dangers. Orwell was writing about a world traumatised by two catastrophic wars, where ideologies struggled for hegemony. Capitalism and Communism united to defeat Fascism, then went against each other once the Nazis were disposed of. Orwell was describing an extrapolated world of political surveillance 40 years into the future from the time he was writing about. Shades of the East German Stasi (Staatssicherheit). It was a warning well worth heeding, as discussed a little later.

Instead of being an instrument of suppression and paranoia, the Internet is the greatest force for the democratisation of information since the printing press. It puts the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years of cultural evolution at the disposal of billions of people world-wide.

In the world of the early 21st century, Capitalism has triumphed. With the exception of some hard-liners, the world is sold on Capitalism. Peace and prosperity, consumer goods for all. A comfortable life. A good standard of living. Former foes Germany and Japan now major economic powers thanks to America's efforts to rebuild their economies post WW2. The Soviet Union disbanded, each former constituent state pursuing their own prosperity agendas. Still a couple of hard-line Communist states left standing, but for how long? China surging ahead as an economic powerhouse. Now all we have to do is figure out how to bring the developing world to the table for a share.

The Internet as it is today

Technology in the early 21st century allows people to project their minds anywhere in the world, unbounded by physical limitation. In a sense the human mind has come to encompass the entire planet. This is a fair description of the Internet, the most powerful and pervasive tool ever constructed by us humans, the cleverest of all tool-makers.

We speak of the Internet as a single entity, but it is really a vast heterogenous entity that exists beyond anyone's control. As much as nations and global conglomerates would like to exercise control over the Internet, it is ultimately beyond anyone's control. It was designed that way. Originally conceived in the late 1960's by the US Military's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a fault-tolerant communications system, it had to withstand having elements of it be destroyed or made unserviceable, while the rest continued to function. At the time, telephones were the only 'theatre-scale' communications systems, but the centralised switching mechanisms were vulnerable to attack, making the whole system unreliable. There would be an obvious advantage in having digital communications that side-stepped this vulnerability in the event that the cold war became hot.

Today you can use the Internet to quickly access information on any topic, however obscure. Beyond satisfying your curiosity on any subject, you can look up someone's phone number, buy from an array of millions of items for sale, access government services, find books in your local library, read the newspaper, check the weather, the sports scores, or the price of real estate. You can do your banking, book a flight to the other side of the world, reserve a hotel room for when you get there, a rental car to drive around in, concert or movie tickets and restaurant reservations for after the show. Online maps and high resolution satellite images let you visit places and navigate through them. You can visit these places in cyberspace and make arrangements before travelling to them physically.

You can make friends on social networking sites, find romance, arrange casual sex, display your artwork and seek out like-minded people to communicate with about the most specialised interests. You can download movies and music, much to the annoyance of the recording industry and movie studios. You can spend more and more of your time in cyberspace playing immersive online games like Second Life and World of Warcraft. And this is where the addictive nature of the web is most clearly seen. Some people, particularly those with an introspective nature, are more comfortable in cyberspace and prefer to dwell there most of the time.

Susan Greenfield in her recent book ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century speculates that people will become so accustomed to the safe, sanitised world on-line that meeting people face-to-face in the real world will be disgusting in the same way that a meat-eater today would be disgusted if they had to actually slaughter and butcher an animal to obtain the meat rather than find it in sterile cling-wrap from an air conditioned, muzak-enhanced supermarket.

What are the risks of technology?

With greater transparency and access to information globally comes the potential for abuse. But with the many benefits of information technology, it is arguable that the potential for abuse should not in itself prohibit the use of technology, as the Luddites would suggest.

We need for the technologists who are the creators of our technological future to have an mindset that moderates the potential for harm. This offers a viable way forward into a technological future.

We need to know what we are dealing with. What are the various ways that technology can be used to harm people? There is intellectual property theft where all manner of material from photos, to text, to music and videos is copied and distributed without the owner's permission. Otherwise known as 'piracy', the annual loss of revenue is reckoned by the recording industry to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, though these estimates are considered by some to be grossly inflated.

There is pornography, a very broad spectrum of material ranging from non-violent erotica between consenting adults, to fetish erotica between consenting adults all the way to non-consensual material and the most depraved of all involving violence towards children.

Identity theft is widespread where someone's personal information is mis-appropriated and fraudulently usually to the detriment of the owner.

Privacy is a major problem where your email address and other personal information is distributed to unknown third parties without your consent. Spam is a prime example.

Cultural differences around the world mean that material that is considered acceptable in one culture is able to reach other cultures in other parts of the world, causing offence. There are also issues like stalking and cyber-bullying, gambling, and social inequity that gives greater access to information to some and not others.

The ethical technologist

How can we instil an ethical do no harm mindset in technologists? For the past six years I have been trying to do that with IT students at Griffith University. Such a process must go beyond the teaching of professional codes of conduct, though this is a good place to start. It must reach into every area of a proto-technologist's life, drawing the different compartments of their lives into an integrated self-aware whole. They must appreciate the human consequences of their actions, even when they occur at a distance, beyond their senses and the cubicle-constrained world in which they work.

We talk about moral philosophy and the various theories that have grown up over the past two and a half thousand years since the Classical Greek philosophers first turned their minds to the task. Some students find this interesting, but for many it is a struggle, not only to appreciate the nuanced thought of the great philosophers, but also to see the relevance of it to technology students such as they. Students who seek the comfort of knowing there is a definite right and wrong answer, are uncomfortable with shades of grey.

We review the common denominators of moral behaviour in philosophical and religious thought, those persistent recurring truths that find expression across time and cultures. We discuss how to become aware of the cause and effect linkages that permeate our lives. How one's decisions in this moment determines what happens to us in the future. Accepting that one is ultimately responsible for what happens to us as a necessary step towards self-mastery and a constructive future.

This is a theme well-explored in the literary world as well. American writer John Steinbeck said this in Chapter 34 of his 1952 novel East of Eden:

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too -- in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite changes we might impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well -- or ill?

Steinbeck seems to be saying that all human endeavours, all of our thoughts and actions, can be distilled down to a single theme, the on-going struggle within us between good and evil. Our challenge is to develop enough insight into the web of causality that we are able to consciously choose the course of action that will involve good consequences. And in so doing gain more effective control over our life and where you want it to go.

How does this apply to technologists? I propose the following two simple principles for ethical IT practice. It is simply expressed because I follow Einstein's advice that the greater the truth, the more simply it can be expressed. Complex theories are beloved by academics but are lost on most students. It is simplicity that gets the message across.

A technologist's action can be said to be ethical if the person(s) affected:

Gives their informed consent, and
Is not de-humanised in the process

There has been extended debate in tutorials on whether informed consent alone is required. If a person does not mind being de-humanised or harmed then that is their choice and this should be respected. Arguably though, it is better that we do nothing to de-humanise others since to do so will likely result in our own dehumanisation and so impair our ability to act ethically in the future.

In other words, technologists (and people generally) need to have enough awareness of the web of causality to let them consciously choose the course of action that will involve good consequences.

Humanising technology

So the two important aspects of ethical technology development are that people are made aware of the consequences of use and give their informed consent before using it, and that the technology does not de-humanise the person in the process. Ideally, technology should enhance a person's humanity, but at the very least it should not diminish it.

The humanising influence is a more complex idea. What do we mean when we say technology must not de-humanise those that use it? It is remembering that the technology is a means to an end, and not an end in itself. People before technology. Technology the servant, not the master of people.

It is not uncommon for technologists to fall in love with the technology they create, and overlook that this beautiful artefact is not an end in itself, a thing of beauty in which they have invested themselves. Many technologists I have known regard themselves as part technician, part artist. If this tendency to regard technology as an end in itself is not curbed, it will produce a world in which people increasingly serve the needs of technology.

A humanist perspective in technology development therefore keeps the technology user-friendly, life-affirming.

The idea that technology can be a de-humanising influence in the world is not a new one. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his influential 1954 essay The Question Concerning Technology suggested that technology is an expression of the human tendency to exploit and mechanise the natural world. Over time, we are de-humanised in a world where efficiency and exploitation rule, and an appreciation of Nature for its own sake is diminished.

From an evolutionary psychology point of view, we humans have throughout our long past made tools that improve our chances of survival in a hostile environment. We made tools that change and control our natural environment. After hundreds of thousands of years, we became so good at it that the tools became an end in themselves. The part of the human mind that had become so good at dominance and control grew too influential, at the expense of a person's gentler nature.

So technology should not be an end itself. It is there to help people to live their lives more fully, to achieve their human potential. As Kelly points out, technology at its best can help people express their true selves and highest potential. Imagine Mozart in a world before the technology of the piano had been invented, or Van Gogh in a world before inexpensive oil-paints had been invented, or Hitchcock before the technologies of film. Today, there are millions of children being born for whom their technology of self-expression has not yet been invented.

References

Clark, Andrew J. (2003). Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford University Press, New York.

Heidegger, Martin (1949): The Question Concerning Technology. From Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Kelly, Kevin (2007). Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web. Presentation at the Technology Entertainment and Design Conference 2007 Monterey California. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html

Greenfield, Susan (2008). ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. Sceptre.

Orwell, George (1990) 1984. Signet Classic. (First published 1949).

Steinbeck, John (1980). East of Eden. Penguin Books. (First published 1952).

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1975) The Phenomenon of Man. Harper Collins

David Tuffley is a Lecturer in the School of ICT at Griffith University. Before academia, David consulted in the computer industry for 17 years beginning in London in the 1980's. David studied Psychology, Anthropology and English Literature at the University of Queensland in the early 1980's. More recently at Griffith, David has been the exploring the nature of leadership and influence in the virtual world.

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