The Retrospective Ethics of AI
Horizons of Responsibility.
We live in a world on the precipice of change, in general and fuelled by the constant connectedness of our lives anxiety is growing. Our media biases conflate the issue, the popularity of articles promoting fear compound themselves. Recently the media anxiety pumps have been working on AI, the thoughts of an AI infested future challenging our status-quo, will we lose our jobs? How will we find purpose? Will it threaten our lives? How can we be sure it will consider our safety in its actions? Our concerns directed inwards to our liberty rarely outwards to our responsibilities.
It was once difficult for us to know the characters of our ancestors, the actions, achievements and values of our great grandparents are a mystery to most. We have a fascination with our history and work tirelessly to unearth, preserve, learn and judge the lives of another time.
The timelines of our lives will be far more accessible than any generation before, painted across immutably dispersed social networks for future generations to discover. As society evolves through growth and progress we continuously look back on ourselves, the further back the less consideration and respect given to the privacy of data.
Progress through thesis, antithesis and synthesis will leave a future generation looking back on our stories with a morally critical eye just as we look back on those of the past, the ones we are able to decipher. Our stories will be more vivid, more complete, more transparent, computer generated narratives conducted by an all seeing all learning AI. Telling our Grandchildren, the decisions we made, our every action, our achievements and lived values.
We have more data stored about us now than has ever existed, our lives, movements, spending habits, health, opinions, actions and decisions all for the most part traceable in a sea of big social data. AI and machine learning will be able to stitch together a spatial timeline of our lives our cultures and behaviours traversable by a future generation at the meta, macro and micro level. All available through the erosion of the perceived need for privacy over time.
Generations cast judgements back and forth, we look back and see reductionist management, fascism and bigotry from an intuitive position of liberty. Others look forward and see consumerism, consumption and greed born from the same rationally unaware context, judgmental responsibility born from changes in culture. Most likely a future generation will look back and converge on a single point of view; “they considered their liberties more than the horizon of their responsibilities”. Perhaps this has always been true.
Almost every generation is prepared to fight for liberty, few are now prepared to fight for the responsibility that goes beyond the boundaries of their own horizon. Boundaries made ever shorter through instant gratification, credit on-tap and a life style lived on the hedonic treadmill.
The difference that our consciences must learn to contend with is the future transparency of our current actions. Presented to our loved ones and peers by an interpreter with yet un-tapped learning capabilities. At some point this future will become reality, perhaps given the vulnerabilities leaked to the media the actions of our own and other governments mean in some measures it already is.
We have already seen how liberally our data can be accessed and through how many different ways. The impact significant; as a recent example there were at least 2 confirmed suicides from the Ashley Madison hack. Perhaps preventable if one had realised a priori that your private intuitive self was going to have to stand alongside your public rational self and justify its actions.
If our data in the future no longer remains secret, our actions will be transparent and through that data our characters will be judged. They will be judged against values we have yet to discover or that only some of us will currently empathise with.
Emancipation in a then split America now seems like an ethical imperative, but once it was contested enough to bring a nation to war. The suffragette movement lead to necessary representative change, now seen as an obvious human right, once openly contested. Our cultures develop and learn new moral lessons over time and now more so than ever we can be judged for our decisions and actions in line with those cultural and moral norms.
Whilst some of our greatest ethical clanger’s like world wars, nuclear weapons and an ocean of waste can already be judged with a fair amount of retrospective criticality the majority of our future faux pas may not as yet be understood, we do not yet know the contextual standards that we will be measured against. An evolving culture has to establish baselines to measure itself against.
So, although we can’t know how the future will judge our history we can turn this omniscient dystopian AI critic to a utopian realtime measure of character and pre-empt its prying behaviour.
We can I believe with some confidence be excused for not having complete foresight, we live in a complex world, a world of systems within systems contained only through bounded rationality. The best that we can do is leverage the understanding that our future actions will be judged and transparent, perhaps even within our own lifetimes, most likely tbh.
Our rational, ethical interjections available to us at any moment will be our emancipation. It is an inherent fault that we care about ourselves more than others but then choose to value the opinions of others over our own, but a fault that can be leveraged, if at any given moment our current efforts are known to be knowable.
In our day to day living if we live in accord with our own values and pay closest attention to the virtue of our actions and thoughts above all else then at some point in the future when we are judged and held to account, not by any celestial being but by our own kind, thinking in the same way and living with the burden of our actions they will at least see that we tried. That we did care and occasionally we may find ourselves a fulcrum to great change and like those that came before us hopefully we will have the character to leverage that change through rational sacrifice.
Normal people made great through the recognition of benevolent and sacrificial acts tend to be those we hold in highest regard, rarely in the moment, mostly in retrospect. Those that failed often seen as extremists, the virtuous mean only really found after synthesis of the majority opinion.
Knowing that we will reach a point of time when AI will be able to orchestrate a realtime play of our lives, learning about our behaviours from a multitude of sources and presenting them back in life like detail. Knowing that one day there will be no privacy to the data that already exists justifies the need to extend our horizon of responsibility, to incorporate into our current actions thought for others far into the future.
We aren’t yet brave enough to share some of our innermost thoughts and acts, the contrast between our public and private selves is too severe. We believe we are too different from each other and whilst it might seem right and needed to argue for a horizon of responsibility that spans generations, long enough into the future that it can be met by those judging us, in truth the solution is far shorter, far more momentary.
In the future, we won’t be judged by our thoughts for the time we didn’t live in, we will be judged by the effect we had on the time we did. This isn’t a long horizon, in itself it is a single moment, every moment, our lives are constant change, the universe is change, time moves forward with our actions and in this we have an opportunity to perceive and respond. To be judgemental of our own perceptions and our own responses, to remember that when we are presented with an ethical decision that someone is already watching, someone in another time talking about what you did and how you did it, watching it unfold in their realtime. Shall we endure and persevere to make them proud, better still to make us sure in our own characters today?
Main influences (and worth reading):
Viktor Frankl — Man’s Search for Meaning
Donella H. Meadows — Thinking in Systems
Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
