
Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-Being [pdf] - tacon
https://standards.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee-standards/standards/web/documents/other/ead_v2.pdf
======
tsunamifury
There seems to be two camps for technology broadly now: "Humans should control
technology" and "Technology should control humans." There are some middle
camps like Humans should control technology that should control humans like
China, but roughly thats still nets out to "technology should control humans".

I'm starting to see designers, whether systems, UX or Eng flavored, as the
last defense against the "Technology should control humans" camp, but
ironically, they have the most to gain from that camp as well in the middle
term, a la China.

I applaud the IEEE for tackling such a high level topic like this and framing
it so clearly. As a designer myself, I'm fully in the camp that Humans should
control technology, its a tool that should be clear and discrete. This in
itself is a key part of "well-being" as I believe the other half results in
things such as addiction, abuse, and unwilling control.

However, when it comes to corporate environments, its becoming harder and
harder to define humans as the control point, since there are so many corp
benefits to putting technology in control. How have you seen this yourselves?
Have you come up with defensive tactics or evangelized human well-being? I'd
love to know how.

~~~
kbenson
> There are some middle camps like Humans should control technology that
> should control humans like China, but roughly thats still nets out to
> "technology should control humans".

> However, when it comes to corporate environments, its becoming harder and
> harder to define humans as the control point, since there are so many corp
> benefits to putting technology in control.

If you're a bit lenient on how you define "technology" so that it includes
policy and process, then that group of humans controlling technology
controlling humans gets _much_ larger, as it starts to define most medium to
large businesses. Put in that context, it might be more accurate to think of
it not in terms of technology, but _systems_. Humans have been using systems
to control humans for millennia, and the arguments are just as old, and the
system controlling the people is not a new trope either (e.g. Orwell's classic
_1984_ ). I suspect researching and regurgitating those discussions will yield
interesting perspectives.

~~~
tsunamifury
1984 specifically has not aged well to the point of its predictions becoming
both trite and easily dismissible in a corporate setting. Its sort of
exaggerated misery and book burning was so on-the-nose that society of course
knee-jerk rejects anything associated with it. I think the lesser understood
brother, A Brave New World, better illustrated how we arrived at these forms
of control because we prefer them in the pursuit of happiness. Its this
difficult trade-off which is inherently post-capitalistic, convenience for
control, that we seem to not have a clear way to have a dialog around.

------
4werfaw34r
For most tech, the design is aligned with the goals of the business that made
it. Until you invent ethically aligned capitalism, limited progress can be
made.

~~~
whatshisface
Ethically aligned capitalism is just regular capitalism with ethically aligned
people, no different from the ethically aligned version of any other society.

~~~
4werfaw34r
No. Companies believe their only duty is to protect shareholder value, so
that's what drives their decision making, not ethics. As long as we have that
problem, it won't matter how many ethical people we have in our society. As of
right now, we have plenty of people who want to do the right thing, but can't
because they'll lose their jobs.

------
HocusLocus
The document itself seems to have been written by an AI doggedly determined to
use a limited conference vocabulary, from template sentences, and drop names
and subjects in lists so they can be very name-droppy, non-sequitir-expressy
and hot-linky.

Even the questions (search for ?) are templatey.

It's weird. Jump around to a random spot and mentally parse a paragraph.
Glance at the one before and after and see if a question forms in your mind:
"Why (do you, did you, would you bother to) say that?" ... the next paragraph
is has no answer, just more of the same.

Perhaps I have just awakened from a dream world of simple actions and visceral
experience to discover another world of human termites that only communicate
with vague chemical signals. Maybe the limited vocabulary describes chemiistry
and these people attend conferences so they can sniff one another.

------
thoughtstheseus
Yeah, this was written by AI.

