The morality in the toolbox

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A new study has some interesting results pointing to resistance to AI stemming from moral and not just “practical” concerns. Pre-publication article here

While I might disagree that moral concerns are separable from “practical” or “pragmatic” ones on the grounds that the practical results of one’s actions have a moral valence, I do think this is an interesting set of findings and hope to see more research on moral, ethical, and even religious reactions to advanced technologies.

I’ll offer one way to think about this. Tools (technologies, things) aren’t moral actors in their own right, but their creation and use has moral implications. The more specific a tool, the more the morality that led to its development comes into focus.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead is widely (and probably incorrectly) credited with saying that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture is a healed femur. Whoever actually made this claim should’ve taken created because they created an interesting thought experiment. There’s a moral claim being made that places the beginning of human civilization at the ability and willingness to share someone else’s burden and care for a community member who, left to the course of nature, would surely die before their bone could heal. There’s is certainly something appealing at implicitly saying the dawn of human civilization began with a very specific kind of tool: a splint. This new technology made such healing possible. The splint, a tool whose only purpose is to heal an injury and, on top of that, assumes someone else is able and willing to take on the survival load of the injured person has moral urgency. As a fable of community, civilization, and technology, this is quite compelling. For the purposes of morality and technology, this story creates one pole for moral technology: The morality of the splint is one of community, healing, and shared endeavors.

The morality of the sword is quite different and a good example of the other pole of morality and technology. As much as I like swords (I was a collegiate fencer and I do enjoy DnD as well as medieval books and movies) it is hard to avoid understanding their purpose. The morality of the sword stems from the idea that killing other humans is permissible and even sometimes desirable. At inception, a sword had no other purpose, there are far better, cheaper, and easier tools for building a house, excavating valuable resources, chopping wood or any other creative endeavor. Even for defense against animals or people, spears, clubs, and similar simpler tools can work better for most folks. The sword requires specialization to produce and to use effectively. It would seem to encourage, if not outright demand, hierarchy. To put it simply, swords are for specialists to use to kill people. The morality of the sword is one that elevates aggression in a zero sum game of survival and conquest.

Stark contrasts here for single-purpose, specialized tools. What does that mean for us today?

Many of our digital tools have multiple purposes and even their developers had multiple aims in their creation. So the morality, then, shifts to the use of the tool. Just like with humans, tools of general utility can widely vary in their moral implications. We, as people, project our morality on to these tools by how we use them. The most effective users will, intentionally or not, imprint their moral agendas onto these tools. Use, over time, will also create specializations in these tools that show off the morality that “won” among their various users. As the tools seem to do more “thinking” or at least have the autonomy to execute on decisions in ambiguous situations, the moral programming that guided their actual programming begins to have more “practical” or “pragmatic” import.

Its no wonder, then, as we create tools that are more an more like us, more autonomous and wide ranging, we struggle with the moral implications of why our tools get created and what they will be allowed to do.

Claude vs the war machine

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Dario Amodei responds to the demands that Anthropic drop its safeguards against domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons (which a rational Department of Defense would not have demanded anyway).

I know I beat up on Anthropic for watering down their responsible scaling policy in the last post, but this is a big deal in a very positive way and they deserve credit for it. Now, just because a tech company does a positive thing, even a big positive thing, that doesn’t mean past missteps need to be forgotten, but praise is definitely due here.

Tech company leadership for responsibility and democracy has been thin on the ground lately, so this is incredibly heartening and refreshing.

Now nobody wants to steer the bus?!

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Anthropic, the AI company, has long been trying to differentiate itself as the “safe” and “responsible” choice in AI. Where companies like OpenAI have long made it clear that safety or responsibility are not a priority, or maybe not even a concern, and AI efforts like Grok seem to be premised on the idea that irresponsibility is the right way to go, Anthropic sold itself as the company bucking that trend.

From Dario Amodei’s articles on the importance of interpretability to picking a fight with the Pentagon over surveillance and autonomous weapons (where I now think Antropic is more likely than not to cave), it seemed like Anthropic would be different. So it comes as a shock when Time Magazine reported that Anthropic was dropping its longstanding safety pledge. At its heart, the Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) promised that Anthropic would never train an AI system without an advance guarantee that the company’s safety measures could compensate for anticipated risks from that system. The company hoped other developers would follow suit, but they didn’t. Now Anthropic has adopted the ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that Anthropic chose to follow the money, with the rumor of an IPO this year, but it is disappointing. This is doubly true when there aren’t a lot of others willing to bear the pro-safety flag. The US, under the Trump administration, has declared a holiday from AI responsibility, even the EU seems to be backtracking. International organizations have followed suit as well. At this point, we’re left with the UN and the Pope demanding safety, but neither of them actually develop AI.

In his important article “The Urgency of Interpretability”, Anthropic leader Dario Amodei said:

“perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned is this: the progress of the underlying technology is inexorable, driven by forces too powerful to stop, but the way in which it happens—the order in which things are built, the applications we choose, and the details of how it is rolled out to society—are eminently possible to change, and it’s possible to have great positive impact by doing so.  We can’t stop the bus, but we can steer it.“

It’s still true that we have the opportunity, privilege and responsibility to steer the future of technology, but that presupposes there’s someone with the courage to steer that bus.

Trustworthy allies

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In my forthcoming book, I talk a lot about tech, trust, and cooperation as important for technology governance and building trust in innovation.

That being said, it’s been a few years since we’ve seen a good tech “alliance”. So, I’m excited to see what Microsoft, et al., put together with the new “Trusted Tech Alliance” announced at the Munich Security Conference. There’s definitely reasons to be optimistic here. If you’ve followed my work on digital trust, some of the principles of this new alliance will be familiar:
*Transparent Corporate Governance and Ethical Conduct
*Operational Transparency, Secure Development, and Independent Assessment
*Robust Supply Chain and Security Oversight
*Open, Cooperative, Inclusive, and Resilient Digital Ecosystem
*Respect for the Rule of Law and Data Protection

These are great principles – transparency, ethics, security, resilience, auditability and good oversight. For years, we’ve known that those help ensure the trustworthiness of digital systems. I’m very hopeful that this will get some traction and the community will expand. It’s rather a sad time that they specifically have to call out “respect for the rule of law” as a principle, but the recent history of tech and of the US federal executive branch makes it necessary. I’m hoping that some of the signatories to this new alliance take that seriously, because I haven’t seen too much commitment to the rule of law from some of them. Perhaps a tiger can change its stripes.

We need to move beyond principles to standards and I think the execs leading this effort understand that. Principles are important, because they give people something to weigh their actions against, but a lot more needs to be done in order to get to the place where the principles can help earn trust. What needs to happen next – and it needs to be communicated as transparently as these principles – is operations and assessment. The big questions this alliance leaves open are:
*What are these companies going to actually do to show they are adhering to these principles?
*How will we know that they are taking those steps?
*What standards of practice or technical standards show progress against these principles?
*How are we going to be able to assess these companies and what can we do when they fall short?

Will certainly be watching this space.

Dialogue, Silence, Tech, & Trust

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Ryszard Kapuściński, the Polish anti-colonialist journalist and poet, wrote: “Silence is a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet.”

There’s a lesson here about technology and trust: Who gets to be part of the conversation, and who gets silenced? With the immense power of new tech concentrated in the hands of a small number of technology owners, this is not an abstract question. It will determine whether tech erodes trust or whether we can earn trust.

Transparency or Dialogue?

Tech can be used to earn trust by increasing transparency and fairness. Or it can be wielded to destroy trust, by enforcing silence. Unfortunately, I’ve seen far too much of the latter in recent weeks. The problem begins with how we talk about dialogue itself. Opening up honest dialogue is certainly a part of transparency. But that dialogue has to be honest and focussed around understanding the truth. What we’re seeing instead is a troubling shift: the prioritization of dialogue as performance over actual transparency. Transparency demands the truth of what is being shared. Dialogue, stripped to its bare mechanics, demands only words.

When the owners and builders of new technology aren’t honest about its benefits and drawbacks, that erodes trust. When those owners create spaces where only their voices are amplified and others are quieted, that erodes trust further. When people witness technology being deployed to benefit a privileged few at the cost of the many, when they watch as tech is weaponized to silence inconvenient voices—that isn’t just unfair. It’s dangerous. And it threatens both technology and society.

For the past year, and especially at January’s World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland we’ve watched tech CEOs and billionaires celebrate their rising influence, increasingly finding themselves in positions of political power and favor. Their confidence is palpable. Their platforms are vast. And their willingness to use those platforms selectively by amplifying some voices while marginalizing others has become impossible to ignore. The difference between private celebration and public suppression couldn’t be more stark. It couldn’t highlight the fundamental unfairness embedded in our current tech infrastructure more sharply.

Control and Silence

Kapuściński again: “Silence has its laws and its demands. Silence demands that concentration camps be built in uninhabited areas. Silence demands an enormous police apparatus with an army of informers.” Looking around, an Minneapolis and elsewhere in the US, I have to ask, what does it mean when the technology we develop becomes part of that silencing apparatus?

The difference between the “dialogue” on the promenade of Davos and the repression on the streets of Minneapolis couldn’t be more stark. It couldn’t highlight the unfairness of tech (and society) any more sharply. On the largest scale, social media, increasingly powered by AI, is shattering what’s left of our global digital commons. In the warring narratives of Minneapolis, the US federal government used whatever technical savvy at its disposal to elevate grudges and lies over truth and responsibility. As if seeking to embody this trend, TikTok, under new, ostensibly American and certainly less competent ownership, turned its addictive algorithm sharply to the right. On an individual level, the surveillance state we’ve been warning of for over a decade now allows for personal revenge against the administration’s enemies, with facial recognition used to both take away privileges and track down new victims for ICE.

You can’t earn trust without listening to others, enforced silence breeds resentment and distrust. Using technology, especially the very tools that promised to connect us and democratize information, to create that enforced silence is a betrayal of innovation and of our best hopes for the future. Responsibility – for truth, for honesty, and for innovating for trust – can only be postponed, and people will only be silenced for so long.   

This hiatus was much longer than expected

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In the meantime, I did, in fact, keep busy. Just not on this blog.

After spending some time at something like an international organization, with a strict outside activities policy (!), I’m free and feeling comfortable getting back to this blog. It’s been a long and difficult road, but I learned a lot and hopefully helped some people along the way.

You can catch up on my brand new personal (like, personal-professional, we are not that close) website here:
https://www.dobrygowski.com

I’ve also written a book! It’s called Technology Governance: Build Trust into Digital Innovation! It will be published in May 2026.

Preorder it today and be the first kid on your block who understands what Technology Governance needs to look like if we’re going to make it through our current adventures in technology, law, and policy.

Preorder here:
on the publisher’s site (KOGANPAGE25 for 25% off):
on Bookshop.org
on Barnes & Noble
and if none of those work for you, on Amazon.

Short Hiatus – June/July 2015 – Reading assignments below

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This blog is taking a short hiatus to concentrate on other publications and assorted duties and obligations. Should be back online in August.

Here’s some of the things that we found interesting recently.

The Agency – Russian military strength, diplomacy, and modern culture is apparently all just 4chan now.

Broadband for the Poor – FCC still fighting the “digital divide” battles of the 1990’s

Sharing Data, but not happily – People don’t like the tradeoffs that they feel the must make in order to live in the digital age

Tech Boom Aimed at the Few – It isn’t the consumers we should be worried about, it’s the builders

The Cardinals Hack the Astros – Hacking?! There’s no hacking in baseball!

“If I Speak in Tongues of Cash…”

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This isn’t directly related to technology, law and policy (well, not to technology anyway), but here’s my article, “The Catholic Case for Campaign Finance Reform,” recently published in America magazine.

In the article, I make a moral case for the reform of campaign finance and the related issue of how influence accrues in Congress. I think that reformers in the area make a lot of technical claims, but we need to address why the current system is wrong, morally and effectively, in order to get people interested.

My original title, reproduced above, was a play on 1 Corinthians 13, but I think the new one makes a broader statement, even if it lacks humor.

You, Consumer, are a RadioShack Bankruptcy Asset. Congratulations (?)

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RadioShack, as many well know, finally declared bankruptcy this year. This is likely to finally give economists peace of mind, since the continued existence of the Shack had many questioning their own devotion to the tenets of the dismal science.

One interesting fact has come out of the bankruptcy proceedings – RadioShack customer’s private data may very well be one of the companies most significant assets.

Brief primer on bankruptcy: when a company can no longer pay its debts, it can seek protection from creditors from the federal judiciary. There are a number of ways to declare bankruptcy, but RadioShack chose Chapter 11, which doesn’t automatically lead to liquidation (that’s Chapter 7), but the reorganization can lead to something that looks a lot like liquidation anyway. And that’s what’s happening here. Amazon is likely to buy some of RadioShack, as are the major cell phone carriers.

In order for this process to work, however, a company going through the bankruptcy must lay all its assets on the table, open its books. Here, RadioShack has listed all the information it has on its past customers as an asset. Your personal information has, for a long time, been the implicitly valuable thing underlying the business model of almost every Internet company. Only here, that open secret has been rewritten explicitly.

And that is why this asset has drawn an objection, but not an objection that this personal data belongs to the consumers. Rather, Apple is objecting that the consumer information that RadioShack collected when it sold Apple products belongs to Apple and should not be considered an asset in this bankruptcy. Apple sees the value of this information and wants it.

As usual, Apple and companies like it have armies of lawyers looking out for their own interests. And, again as usual, consumers simply don’t. This is far from the first time that personal data has left the control of the person and it won’t be the last. Get used to being seen as an asset in someone else’s business.

Walled gardens and micronetworks: Who’s acting ‘for your own good’

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Dale Lately has a though-provoking article in Slate today about how Facebook is trying to colonize social networking around the world within its own network while new start-ups abound that attempt to deliver anonymous or un-censorable communication among their users. What’s interesting is not so much the competition between communications tools that the article describes, but rather the vital, yet unasked, question of what we should expect from the creators and owners of these tool when they lock us into their digital platform.

These a theme running through this piece that we’re about to observe a ‘battle of the networks’ in which people start taking sides in choosing Facebook’s ubiquity versus Snapchat’s promise of ephemeral messaging versus Whisper’s anonymity. This action is the next wave of competition for your time and social ties, the article reasons.

That may very well be true, but the interesting thing that isn’t fully fleshed-out there is the fact that, while Facebook is the most overt of the builders, these are all just walled gardens (except for the mesh networks). If Lately’s version of competition is what’s in store, it is not communication over the public Internet, as we’ve had until now, but rather separate communications over separate networks, which do not communicate with each other, that we’re likely to experience in the near future.

This may erode the Westphalian geography of the world, at least with respect to these digital platforms, this new version of communication erects new, nigh insurmountable borders between types of communicators. If Lately is right, it will be as if, in the mid 20th century, the U.S. only used the telephone, Canada only the telegraph, and Mexico only fax machines – there’d be no way to communicate with anyone except your co-nationalists, with all the ensuing problems one could imagine.

The problem is best illustrated by an anecdote – while at Harvard, I took a class with Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig on Digital Platforms. We were discussing IOS (a strongly walled garden) versus Android, where you could still side-load apps (install applications from somewhere other than the Google Play store). JZ mentioned, almost offhand, that if it led to more vulnerabilities for users, one day Google would likely shut down side-loading, “for our own good.”

And that gives rise to the question we need to ask about all these walled gardens: who decides what’s “for our own good” and how? Without very clear answers to those question, and virtually no one is clear about it now, we should be deeply suspicious of this turn in networking. At the very least, if we are to carve up the formerly borderless Internet, we should be clear about why we’re doing it and who this fragmentation serves.