On Good and Evil, the Mistaken Idea That Technology Is Ever Neutral, and the Importance of the Double-Charge Thesis
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-023-00661-4
No technology is ever “at rest” in the “neutral” sense, not least because every technology is always designed according to some implicit or explicit values, by some people for some people, within a culture and with a culture in mind, for some uses rather than others, with affordances and constraints, and so forth.
When it comes to AI and digital technologies in general, they are not neutral, but double-charged, like all other technologies, but with the good vector much stronger than the evil one.Footnote2 Digital technologies are, when properly designed, a force for good. They are like a Swiss Army knife, not like a bayonet. This is not an optimistic or rosy picture of digital innovation blind to its obvious and frequent misuses, but a suggestion to see in the evil and harmful design, development, and deployment of AI and other digital technologies an exception to be rectified, rather than the rule to be stopped. From this perspective, the responsibility of innovators and designers is both significant and apparent. Beta testing any technology on humans to see what happens and how the technology may be improved, from driverless cars to chatbots based on large language models, is irresponsible also in the sense that it is a failed attempt to deresponsibilise the designers and producers and shift all the responsibility onto the users, small prints included. The same applies to guns. The tragic outcomes of such policies are apparent, especially in the USA.
The design of any technology is a moral act. The neutrality thesis tries to hide this fact, and the responsibilities that it implies. This is unhelpful also because it makes it difficult to clarify the ethical choices and trade-offs that many technologies often require and, therefore, the policies and regulations that need to be devised. Which and whose values should be privileged when designing a technology, given the fact that it is double-charged? Which way should the ball roll, and according to what vectors?
ethical choices may often lie on a Pareto frontier, being all equally best trade-offs. Not every ethical choice is subject to the Anna Karenina Principle (only one way of being a happy family) or Aristotle’s bull’s eye constraint (only one right solution, all the countless others are wrong). All this must be made explicit, discussed, and debated at least to reach a critical agreement to disagree. But one does not get to all these questions if one stops at the neutrality thesis. This may be a convenient head-in-the-sand approach, but it is also a mistake because someone somewhere will have decided about the values embedded. And these “someone” usually prefer their decisions not to be made explicit and evaluated. Coherently, you will find them defending the neutrality thesis. The alternative is to accept the double-charged thesis and build critically, responsibly, and realistically on its basis.