10.30am Thursday

Steve Keirl - Ethics and Technology

Ethics and technology have an intimate relationship to the human being, cannot reference ourselves without reference to our technologies, ethics are a human construct - dependant on the existence of others.
However current people like Singer at Princeton are thinking that ethics are not ethical if they are not applied to the real world - need to be usable to guide our real lives.

Exercise - think about the first 5 minutes of your day - think of the technology that you engage with in that first 5 mins. - Has become invisible to us.

Tools and machines are nothing without their users - power potential capability speed etc

Issue raised from last night - get technologies presented as a fait accompli - not finished but as a track that we are on. Too late to consider the values and ethics once the tech has been presented to us - need to ask the question beforehand about what we would like to design our future to be - ask kids across the world of things that they want - they want peace and environment.

Every person can get into an ethical debate. We are creating an environment in which debate is stifled and critical debate is stifled and ethical concerns are not able to be discussed as a voice of dissent.

4 phases of tech
First step is the intent to design - what is it you are planning to do, 2nd design, 3rd creation or manifestation 4th - use. Think about ethical strengths at each stage.

Four philosophical challenges for us
1st ontological - what is existence?
2nd ethical challenge - know how we want to live and accept or create technologies that serve that.
3rd determinist challenge - determinist would argue there is no such thing as free will. If we want to exercise our free will we have a determinist challenge
4th we can choose to design anything we put our minds to.

Living with the technology we have today is like living with a temperamental elephant.

Thomas Jefferson - knowledge as a lit candle - light one candle from another’s and we have both gained

Jonas Salk - invented of vaccine - when asked whom does the patent belong to he replied the people.

Singer - must use we rather than me.