An Ethics Oath for Scientists and Engineers? Feedback requested.

Alignment Ethics
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I will be giving a presentation at the Architecting for the Global Good instance of IASA’s (free, online) Business Innovation Leadership and Technology conference series. The title is “Master or Servant? Are We Humans Still ‘Top Dogs’ in This Brave New World of Massive IT?”. It will be an extremely condensed journey from the essentials to the ethics of the digital revolution. 11AM Pacific US, 2PM Eastern US, 21:00 Central Europe.

At the end of my presentation I am planning to say something about a potential ‘Hypocratic Oath’ for Scientists and Engineers. I have been inspired by the fact that during the height of the cold war, many physicists signed a ‘Young Pugwash’ oath when they graduated, which was an oath stating you were not going to work on weapons of mass destructions. The draft oath for scientists and engineers in information technology I have written so far is:

As no society can exist without shared convictions, and as the most beneficial convictions are truthful ones, and as the convictions of members of society are strongly influenced by the information that a person consumes, I declare:

  • I will not work on systems that have the effect of damaging society by attenuating the flow of truthful information or by amplifying the flow of untruthful information
  • I will not work on systems that damage people’s security of mind
  • I will not remain silent if I know of such systems being created or used

It is not easy to come up with something with obvious drawbacks. E.g. when you state you don’t want to work on influencing people, you exclude advertisement, and properly regulated advertisement should be possible. There are many other problematic aspects. Such a statement can never be air tight. Still, the above in my view could work.

The above draft specifically mentions ‘damaging society’ to make sure it doesn’t affect free speech too much. The same is true for attenuating/amplifying, which means it is not the free speech itself that is the target of the oath, but specific aspects of it.

The idea of ‘security of mind’ comes from ‘security of person’ from the universal declaration of human right, which generally in constitutions and laws is either specifically written or explained as being about physical security. But information influences us mentally. Hence, people’s minds need to be protected as well as their bodies. I’ve made that specific (the information revolution forces us to rethink human rights as previous it was very hard to ‘look or act inside people’s minds’ at scale (propaganda and brainwashing does this of course). The information revolution may also lead us to have to rethink the structure of a fair society (see also Gossip, Trust and the Information Revolution (‘value’ vs. ‘values’))

I’ve created a version for investors as well:

As no society can exist without shared convictions, and as the most beneficial convictions are truthful ones, and as the convictions of members of society are strongly influenced by the information that a person consumes, we declare:

  • We will not invest in companies that have the effect of damaging society by attenuating the flow of truthful information or by amplifying the flow of untruthful information
  • We will not invest in companies that damage people’s security of mind

I’m posting this now to invite feedback and comments from this community.

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I don’t have much valuable input at the moment, and I am not an ethics expert. Some interesting ethics manifesto’s can be found on Awesome Humane Tech. I recommend checking them out. And also we have ethics expert @DavidRyanPolgar among our members, who might be able to provide some more interesting feedback.

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@gctwnl I will have to read up to better understand the details of what you are doing but from my heart of hearts THANK YOU!!!
I know that there has been talk about the necessity of ethics training as part of Tech qualifications but I’d really like to see ethics taught as a fundamental cornerstone of any degree.

Its a bit of a Dunning-Kruger stunt for me to be saying this (not having studied either ethics or law myself) but the impression I have gleaned of both is that there cannot be a binary distinction at the finite detail edge because all things related to law and ethics (as with science and medicine) are a balancing act involving reading the nuance and context and then choosing the best fit from that perspective.

If you think of ‘first do no harm’ as an example we don’t expect surgeons not to cut the skin because cutting the skin (or sawing a skull open) can be lifesaving or drastically improve quality of life. Rather ‘first do no harm’ implies that the person who is doing this thing is, on balance, improving the situation.

When it comes to ethics for scientists and engineers (my dad was an engineer) 2 things come to mind:

  1. The time frame being considered - I like to think in terms of “what would this look like for my grandchildren’s grandchildren?” Not quite the six generations First Nations people sometimes talk about but close and tangible enough for people who are used to only thinking about the world their children will inherit.
  2. Expanding the understanding of stakeholder to include vulnerable groups easily left off the list if a rigorous lens isn’t applied from the outset.
    By coincidence I just gave an example of this in a comment I made on a post from a large management consultant firm posing the question “is the common good now good for business?”
    My response:
    “Last year before we found ourselves living in an alternate universe the Business Roundtable changed their statement on the ‘Purpose of a Corporation’ from a focus on shareholder primacy to one which recognises all stakeholders. This is their update a year on https://purpose.businessroundtable.org/ If the ballgame genuinely has shifted from short-term, single bottom-line rationalism to something seeking to adequately measure and address negative social and environmental impact at all stages of the business process what does this mean? It means it is no longer acceptable to be pumping water out for bottling or industrial practices when that water is being taken from a community actively fighting bushfires and running out of water. If that sounds like an extreme example then perhaps it is time to broaden your understanding of stakeholder. This expresses the scale of harm borne out of short-term, economic rationalism. There is a lot of hard work to be done to turn this around but those people and organisations with the guts to do it now will reap the rewards.”