Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Infrastructure is boring, expensive, and usually someone else’s responsibility/problem. Which is perhaps how the UK finds itself at what Jeremy Fleming, head of GCHQ, describes as a moment of reckoning. Simon Wardley analyses this in terms of digital…
Just watched the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix, which takes a critical look at some of the tech giants that dominate our world today (although not Netflix itself, for some reason), largely from the perspective of some former employees who h…
In my writings on technology ethics, riffing on the fact that so many cool technologies are presented as the Holy Grail of something or other, I have frequently invoked the mediaeval question that Parsifal failed to ask: Whom does the Grail Serve?Chatb…
ImageNet is a large crowd-sourced database of coded images, widely used for machine learning. This database can be traced to an idea articulated by Fei-Fei Li in 2006: We’re going to map out the entire world of objects. In a blogpost on the Limitations…
In his book on policy-making, Geoffrey Vickers talks about three related types of judgment – reality judgment (what is going on, also called appreciation or sense-making), value judgment and action judgment.In his book on technology ethics, Hans Jona…
I was involved in a debate this week, concerning whether ethical principles and standards should include weapons systems, or whether military purposes should be explicitly excluded.On both sides of the debate, there were people who strongly disapproved…
Last week I was in Berlin at the invitation of the IEEE to help develop standards for responsible technology (P7000). One of the working groups (P7001) is looking at transparency, especially in relation to autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. In thi…
Diversion has various different meanings in the world of ethics.Distraction. An idea or activity serves as a distraction from what’s important. For example, @juliapowles uses the term “captivating diversion” to refer to ethicists becoming preoccupied w…
What are the ethics of diverting people from smoking to vaping?On the one hand, we have the following argument.E-cigarettes (“vaping”) offer a plausible substitute for smoking cigarettes.Smoking is dangerous, and vaping is probably much less dangerous….
In a recent commentary on #Brexit, Simon Jenkins notes that”disruption theory is much in vogue in management schools, so long as someone else suffers”.Here is Bruno Latour making the same point.”Don’t be fooled for a second by those who preach the call…
Many people start their journey into the ethics of automation and robotics by looking at Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm (etc. etc.)As I’ve said before, I believe …
@ruchowdh objects to an article by @etzioni and @tianhuil calling for algorithms to audit algorithms. The original article makes the following points.Automated auditing, at a massive scale, can systematically probe AI systems and uncover biases or oth…