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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of interesting research on the societal impact and the (potential) problems caused by the use of large-scale data analysis and artificial intelligence, e.g. by Kate Crawford at MSFT Research.

Last year I gave a talk on this at 32C3 where I tried to elucidate some of the problems that can pop up when using data analysis to automate things that were previously done by humans:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRY9IceaVig

Personally I see a lot of potential in data analysis & artificial intelligence, but like all technologies they pose significant risks as well. What we really need therefore (IMHO) is to teach ethics to people that work with data, and establish organizations and methods that ensure data analysis isn't used to do harm (deliberately or not).

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People learning or not learning ethics doesn't really have much to do with it. Read up on the Fraud Triangle. Unethical job tasks follow a similar pattern. Perceived need ("I might lose my job if I refuse") and rationalizations ("the results of this flawed algorithm surely won't get taken seriously") get you two-thirds of the way there. The third leg, opportunity, is inherent in this sort of job. So "ethics" are really beside the point when the workers confront the reality of their situation.

    > What we really need therefore (IMHO) is to teach ethics to people

The issue with almost all organized teaching (as opposed to when you don't even know you are doing it, e.g. to your children, every day) is that it only targets conscious thinking. Do you already see the problem with teaching "ethics" (and empathy)? It's the wrong brain area. People will ace the tests but how they actually act won't change. Another big reason for why teaching ethics (the way it is usually done) is that much of behavior is environment-driven. So you can teach someone all you want, if you then place them in a cut-throat competitive "result-driven" environment you can see empathy and ethics quietly sneak out the back door.

Furthermore, ethics is way too cultural and subjective to be taught. Even if we could all agree on macro-rules, eg. hurting peoples is bad whatever hurt they infliged, the more specifics (and micro) we become, the more divergences will arise. And as everythng, our perception of what is "ethics" will evolve.

Being deliberately obtuse goes a long way to delay a logical ending. Flashback to 2004 and the same type of debate/affirmations were posited to Dr Mandelbrot's apocalyptic warnings[0][1] of the imminent subprime crisis.

Instead of learning lessons, the players continue to 'print money out of thin air'[2] and deny any fault for the last collapse. The rationale seems to be, 2007 was an extreme culmination of events that wouldn't happen again in millions of years. Problem is, in a universe of infinite variables, an infinite number of combinations exist and could manifest anytime a given set of vulnerabilities and unanticipated outlier events present themselves concurrently.

[0] The (Mis)Behavior Of Markets 2004

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/665134.The_Mis_Behavior_o...

[1] 2006 reminder

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5372968a-ba82-11da-980d-0000779e23...

[2]The Quants

Great Monday Morning QB analysis on what went wrong & why it will be repeated(hint:greed +ability +hubris)

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7495395-the-quants

edit: fixed links

The ethics being discussed here, though, are, well... not obvious. Political, really. Are you going to be able to get serious agreement about what the correct decisions are in cases like these? By actual argument, and not by shouting down one's opponents?

> What we really need therefore (IMHO) is to teach ethics to people that work with data

Studies seem to indicate that studying and teaching ethics does not make you more inclined towards ethical behavior.[1] On top of that, from personal experience in business ethics courses, "ethical" has an extremely suspicious equivalence with "the thing which limits the company's exposure to liability."

[1] http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/BehEth-14...

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