The Ethics of Progress

We're grateful. we're very grateful if you've enjoyed the journey so far and if you've gained something from it or believe you will or perhaps you know somebody who might please forward or repost this podcast and while we're at it i normally don't have to say anything about the post because our audience is highly educated complicated erudite on top of things issue oriented but all of that said i'm going to say something anyway please pay attention to this we're going to be talking not necessarily about the most important issue of the time but how we handle it we're going to be talking about ai but we're going to be talking about human invention and discovery to begin with Pay attention, I'm about to talk to you about a subject that I've been avidly on for about 10 years, the ethics of progress.

Not the progress of ethics, the ethics of progress.

That's in our hands.

The history and the future of ethical decision-making change every time we bring up the subject.

The current change, AI, already underway with unprecedented force, helps us explain two things.

Number one, it is now the area of greatest concern for leaders and the organizations hiring them, trying to take the long view. But that's difficult because the risk-reward of these decisions, as my second statement, has never been more dramatic.

Leadership at its core, then, is also changing, and with it, its role. Here are five compelling questions and the beginnings of what will be ongoing conversations about ethics and progress.

Ethics question number one.

How can we build an organization with ethical values, attitudes, and beliefs that foster ethical behavior at its core?

How can we do that when the onslaught of pressure to be unethical in the name of competitive leadership are mounting simply to compete?

Ethics question number two.

What comes first, invention, assessment, or ethical reigns? Do any of these need to be the necessary precedent?

Do we do something first and then deal with it, or do we prepare for it and then do it? That's the question.

Ethics question number three. Are ethical decision-making and competitive risk incompatible?

I think every leader has to ask him or herself that question and deal with it in an equally ethical method of answer.

Question number four. how prevalent is the weighing of the pros and cons of being the first or second to take ethical measures?

And ethical question number five, or ethics question number five, can ethics and progress uphold each other without fail?

And reflectively, if you look at the five questions as a unit, How have they grown in weight over time, especially in this 21st century? But what do you mean this 21st century, some of you might say? We're only talking about AI? Yeah, AI goes back a long way to before World War II, believe it or not.

So that's our perspective.

So we've got a question in front of us. What is progress, actually?

Let's consider inventions and discoveries of things, like movable type, dynamite, pharmaceuticals, things like that.

And not concepts or beliefs like voting rights and public education, although all are indubitably progress. the things we'll consider must be demonstrable, notable, quantifiable, measurable, equitable, wealth-neutral, and history-worthy.

And they must be, to some degree, civilization changers, thus eliminating such popular items as remote-controlled television. It's a great invention, but you know.

We humans have a history of invention and discovery, and we're the only species to claim such distinction.

Our very first invention was stone tools about three million years ago. This might be considered a discovery rather than an invention, depending on one's interpretation of the opening scene of 2001 A Space Odyssey. If you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about. on. If you haven't seen it, see it.

Another couple years, a couple million years went by, and we began with the controlled use of fire.

Well over half a million years after that came the idea of clothing.

So from the first to the second was a million and a half or two million years. From the second to third was a half a million years.

And then through the ensuing millennia, we domesticated animals, institutionalized agriculture, developed alphabets, conducted trade, and accounted for it.

And with each one, less and less time went by before the next one showed up.

And by the time the 20th century exploded upon us with the most dramatic opening decade of all centuries managing change was as essential as change itself let's talk about the choices we make the ultimate question here is not about what we've invented or when we've done it is, rather, the choice we make in how we use these things.

In the case of absolutely every invention or discovery ever, we humans have figured out both the constructive and destructive ways to use them.

Absolutely every single one. For example, flight.

I think that's on everybody's list of top 10 inventions ever. And in 1903, the Wright brothers got us up off the ground.

Hardly a decade later, we put guns on them, bombs on them, and we're fighting a World War I with those beautiful airplanes.

Pharmaceuticals.

The concept was hanging around since long before 1900, But in the 1920s, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, and off we went in no time flat, not only curing you, but addicting you. Not with penicillin, but with pharmaceuticals.

Dynamite was originally invented by Alfred Nobel to help clear roads and blast tunnels through mountains.

But we also figured out how to use it in war.

Yep, every single invention and discovery has that two-edged sword.

Why is all this going on? Well, the answer comes upon considering not just changes, but the nature of change itself.

All physical objects that bring changes, telephones, paved roads, toilets, air conditioning can be physically measured in three dimensions, length, width, and height.

They can be measured in weight.

Change, though, cannot really be measured that way, but it can be measured.

I offer you the concept that there are three dimensions of change.

The nature, the pace, and the scope.

As for the nature of change, can be caused by anyone with an idea.

Unlike ages and centuries and millennia past, when change was the domain of the crown or the church, then the highly educated, and later the world's first merchants.

One could create change through traditional assets, capital, land, shipping lanes, minerals, timber, et cetera.

The wealthy and powerful created change. But today, anyone with an idea has the same potential, and we've seen it.

Tim Berners-Lee had an idea.

Turned into the World Wide Web.

He was a solo computer engineer.

Jeff Bezos had an idea.

How many days go by without you ordering off of Amazon? Sergey Brin and Larry Page had an idea to reorganize the whole world with Google.

They've all changed civilization and came out of virtually nowhere.

The second measurement is the pace of change.

As we've all observed, it's ever accelerating. The problem with that is there's less and less time after each civilization changer than there was after the one before it.

Less time goes by before we're dealing with the next one. The result is less time to think ethically, critically about their place in society. Less time to think of the one existential question.

Could we or should we?

Genetic engineering is a case in point.

Enough said. It's not part of this conversation.

And third, we're dealing with the scope of change.

Once a change takes hold, it reaches farther, faster than any other before it. took alphabets 6,000 years to reach from Ur, Athens, Alexandria, and Anatolia to the Americas.

It took the internet only 30 years to reach 4 billion people. And 1 million people signed up for ChatGPT in the first hour after its loss. launched.

Given the nature of and the pace and the scope of change, along with our demonstrated unawareness or disinterest in weighing the ethical consequences of our decisions, ethics, pay attention now, will be the single greatest challenge of the 21st century and beyond.

Ethics, not technology. Ethics, not demographics. Ethics, not reallocation of assets for civilization. Ethics.

And the lack of attention to ethics will lead to the greatest disasters of all time.

Or can we choose otherwise? wise that is what Dario Amodei the head of the now movement to take control of AI has been saying all along so there are some conclusions well I don't want to use the word conclusion I don't like conclusion that's final a conclusion says I'm doing no more thinking Let's talk about lessons, leadership lessons that we can draw from what I've been talking about.

So here are six decision points designed not to answer the above six questions conclusively, but to continue fanning the flames and keep the ongoing conversation alive. lie.

One, at any given point in history, we are capable of doing more things than we are capable of understanding. We're capable of doing more things than we are capable of understanding.

Two, as more technologies developed that can organize humanity, the more potential we have for chaos.

To me, that's the one that makes me shiver.

Number three, if something becomes possible, it becomes expected.

Once we learn how to do something, we expect to be able to continue doing it, whether for good or evil.

One step taken in advance is longer than 10 steps taken to catch up.

And this is a critical restraint, self-restraint point that we can put on ourselves. Take those steps in advance and lay them out so we know what we're doing when we get there.

Five, with a set of deeply held principles, you will never have to make a decision. Good decisions make themselves.

And six, we better do something because making no decision is worse than making a bad one.

So the one, here we go, the word conclusion we can permit ourselves to make is this. If we think about the consequences of our decisions before we make them, we will make better decisions.

And given the magnitude of the imminent decision and decisions ahead of us, we had better do this one right.

Or it could be the last decision we'll ever have to make.

Dario Amodei is right.

I'm going to take a quick break, to have a cup of tea and rest my voice. I'll be back in a minute. Before we go on, I want to take a moment to thank the people who make this show possible. Vantage Point is brought to you by SingleTask, the team that produces this show. It is also brought to you by Kardam Consulting. It is also brought to you by Bergen Volunteers, neighbors helping neighbors all across Bergen County. this show is also brought to you by my friend and a sponsor of this show from day one stephen bozer thank you all of you for your support and please support them the way they support us and if your organization would like to become a sponsor of this show please don't hesitate to reach out you can find me at ellie amdor that's dot com I'm back with what was initially a section injected to offer diversity of thought and now has been one of the most requested sections ever in this podcast.

My aphorisms, and I offer you two today.

Aphorism number one, we fail only because we allow ourselves to fail.

And number two, when you make plans, tomorrow is more important than today.

When you take action, it's just the opposite.

In the Great Minds section, I want to bring to you a thought from the Roman Cicero and bring it up to the 19th century with one of the great humans on this planet. We'll get to that in a second. Cicero said, What nobler employment or more valuable to the state than that of the man who instructs the rising generation?

Statement is dripping with responsibility and altruism.

And Cicero decided there was no nobler employment than that generation. Now, let's fast forward to the 19th century. And let's talk about a guy who was running around here by the name of Andrew Carnegie.

One of the most wealthy men in the world.

Carnegie believed that his wealth had to be shared.

And it has to be used for the betterment of a society and decided that there was no better way to do that than to build and endow public libraries.

I don't know if you know it, but New York Public, the greatest public library in the world, was endowed by Andrew Carnegie.

The public library in Mount Vernon, New York, just north of New York City, which is where I grew up, was endowed by Andrew Carnegie, and we had the wealth of that library to help us as we grew up.

Andrew Carnegie endowed 2,500 public libraries, and in some cases built them from scratch like New York Public.

So from cicero declaring that there's no nobler employment for carnegie who put that into practice and that brings us to the end of this episode i hope you did what i asked you to do at the beginning and paid attention making the distinction between progress and ethics and the ethics of progress or the progress of ethics.

We have got to see that the progress of ethics continues to increase.

That'll do it for me today.

We've got some great episodes coming up. Don't forget to join us every Monday and Thursday as we bring you episode after episode of Vantage Point. I'm Eli Amdur. See you next time. Until then, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep thinking critically.