Ethics and Impact
Hypothetically speaking, lets say you develop a technology to help the elderly move around their homes. Old people fall less, require less hip replacements, the world is objectively better. For them.
One side effect of this technology is it lets people understand the interior of buildings better. This has other applications. You’ve now made it safer for police to raid a home they’ve never been in before.
One might say, so what? This is a positive. Safer cops means less stressed cops. Less bullets fired before someone really meant to. And they’d be right, for every individual case.
Having made police raids safer, do they happen more often? Are judges and DA’s willing to issue warrants slightly more often give the risk is lower in each individual case?
Have I increased the total number of police raids without sufficiently lowering the incidence of potentially preventable death. Have I effectively changed the world such that more people will die than before I made that change?
How to weigh that against the initial good I was attempting to achieve?
The design ethic’s world talks a good game about thinking through the consequences of our inventions, but sometimes the decisions don’t have clear right and wrong answers. Especially since so much of it is pure speculation.
The impulse to create, to me, is rarely thoroughly malevolent.
Neither is a butterfly flapping it’s wings.
