Epeus' epigone

Edifying exquisite equine entrapments

Tuesday, 25 October 2005

Technology should be amoral

Nicholas Carr's 'The amorality of Web 2.0' has an underlying rhetorical premise that is flawed, and Tim O'Reilly's defence ignores this.

Technology should be amoral. Morality is difficult stuff that should be left to humans to deal with. At best, technology can help inform humans to make moral choices, but to argue, as both sides in this debate seem to be doing, that technology can be moral in itself is to take a dangerous step.

We have millennia of literature arguing against devolving moral choice to simple mechanistic reasoning, from the Solomonic compromise, through the cautionary tales of golems to the modern myths like Brazil.

Indeed, lets look at contemporary cases where we are asked to devolve moral judgements to machines. David Weinberger's Copy Protection is a Crime essay sets out this category error clearly - that DRM eliminates leeway by handing control to stupid mechanisms:
In reality, our legal system usually leaves us wiggle room. What's fair in one case won't be in another - and only human judgment can discern the difference. As we write the rules of use into software and hardware, we are also rewriting the rules we live by as a society, without anyone first bothering to ask if that's OK.

David Berlind and Walt Mossberg have picked up on this too, realising that code is not good at subtlety and judgement.

Similarly the Censorware Project and the OpenNet Initiative document the shortcomings of using computers to decide whose idea can be seen online by crude keyword filtering.

When designing software and the social architecture of the web we do need to think about these issues, but we must eschew trying to encode our own, or others, morality into the machine.

Technorati Tags: DRM, meme

Posted by Kevin Marks at 03:15

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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