In the beginning Google had an ethic, do no harm, then they realized they were a company and decided shareholder value was at odds with that, so they removed it. When you think about it though, it’s pretty ridiculous to ask a for profit company to have ethics let alone my personal ethics, and do we even want a company determining our ethics? I propose that technology companies are making ethical decisions on our behalf every day, but really they need to stop that and allow individuals to apply their own ethics, I call it the pluggable API for ethics.

Once again this thought experiment was induced by the Voices of VR podcast, in particular Episode # 931 about ethically aligned design. First, it got me thinking that unfortunately there is not a universal ethic, nor should there be. If I don’t believe in science, or god, or the color red, so be it. The technologies I use should reflect that ethic. This is a tough thing to accept, especially for western technology companies based here in the Silicon Valley. But, they need to get over thinking just because they make the technology they can control the ethics behind it. You really have to buy in the mantra that no technology is good or bad.

That got me thinking if there is a global ethic that everyone could agree on, my conclusion was No there is not. In the pluggable ethics story, technology devices and their software remove the ethical decision making an abstract it through an API. Users can apply their own “ethics module” into these devices so they behave as the user wants them to. Who would design these ethic modules? Hopefully an entity not purely driven by economic profit. Some equate ethics with religion, so certainly religious bodies would be interested in module creatione (especially if they could take their tithe right off the top) Political parties spend alot of time preaching ethics, so they probably would as well. These APIs don’t have too many fundamental rules, the one I could think of is that one “ethic” isn’t better than another, and no ethic can be programmed to destroy another. One of the hardest things to control seems to be the tendency for the majority (whether vocal or silent) to squelch the minority. So if you are part of the red is best ethic, destroying the blue ethic can’t be a thing.

Science fiction is a great form of user story, science fiction writers can easily explore concepts like this. I would be interested in any writing around a concept like this to further the thought exploration of pluggable ethics! What if it was more obvious that the big technology companies were making ethical decisions everyday? I want to read (or write!) this sci-fi novel.