Freedom of Human Beings in a highly digitalized World
One reason why I work in IT security is that I am not afraid of darkness or looking at scary potentials. As much as I love freedom in being creative, I am intrigued by the responsibility which comes with it. When Laura Degiovanni, the founder of TiiQu, invited me to analyze the algorithm which produces a number as a measure for digitally verified claims of a professional, I was aware that this was a real challenge for me.
Everything went quite smoothly until I got to a point where I couldn’t purely decide upon pure common sense and mathematics with a clear conscience anymore. The objective to measure the behavior of a professional human being in a fair way really seemed out of my scope. So we started to look for someone who can help us with the ethical and psychological inspection of the tools we are building. We found Prof. Dr. Claus Dierksmeier from the World Ethics Institute, which works on sustainable approaches of introducing ethical behavior in economic environments.
Lately I had a discussion with a much appreciated colleague about the sense of working on algorithms with regard to ethics. We almost yelled at each other in the café, and looking back I am thankful for more insight into people’s feelings about this topic. He said that economy is about making money, and people can choose what kind of mechanisms they use. I countered that we are far away from this freedom already, and producers of software are responsible for their impact on societies and humanity if they like it or not.
Think about pricing on shopping platforms for example. In some areas it has become common that the price of a product increases when you look at it more than once before you buy it. Now who looks more often at a product before they buy it, a rich or a poor person? Of course until now we might be intelligent enough to use private windows for shopping, because this kind of pricing is often based on cookies. But will it stay like this? And does everybody know this trick?
We are talking about the increasing problem of inequality in the world, many people are afraid of it, not only the poor. In the above example the question remains if the implemented mechanisms really increase the income of the involved merchants in a long term vision. So back to why I believe that it is worth to include ethical considerations into the development of powerful technologies, first obviously for ethical reasons, and second, for economic sustainability it might be worth to look at it from new angles too.
Technology giants have become more powerful than states, and with power comes responsibility. The effects of the power are not diminished by ignorance. Even if we don’t know how to do it exactly by now, there are many ways of trying, inspecting, adjusting, monitoring and interrupting what went wrong. Maybe in a few years we can choose between two versions of the Google search algorithm, ethical and unethical. At least that is how I resolved the discussion with my colleague, because he felt introducing ethical guidelines to companies would be to much control over an economic ecosystem which should balance itself. Then the ones who hate ethics can just decide to use the unethical mechanisms :-)
