Archives for posts with tag: ethics

Book Review: Scary Smart by Mo Gawdat

March 10, 2023 //
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Want to get really scared and hopeful at the same time?

Scary Smart is a low level dive into the technology of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and deep level dive into the ethics and morality of those who are most responsible for how A.I. will turn out:

Us.

A.I. may seem like the new buzz term with its adoption into our daily lives through products like ChatGPT’s Open A.I. platform and Bing’s real question search algorithm; however, A.I. is baked into almost everything we do with technology. Every app on our phones and every social media platform we interact with has A.I.’s fingerprints all over them.

Mr. Gawat’s premise in “Scary Smart” is that A.I. is a child. And the best way to predict what kind of teen and adult we will get with A.I. is to be good parents. A brilliant initial example from our current comic book obsessed culture is Superman. What kind of Superman would Clark Kent have become of Jonathan and Martha Kent were greedy, selfish, and aggressive? There is no doubt that A.I. is already smarter than humans in many specialized areas, but what happens when A.I. becomes just generally smarter than the smartest human and has access to all the knowledge of humanity through the internet?

Unfortunately, humanity is not doing a very good job of raising A.I. as a child. From our methods of creating and improving these machine intelligences all the way through to the tasks that we are giving them perform, we are emphasizing our worst instincts: To create wealth, surveille our citizenry, gamble, and coming to a battlefield near you soon – to kill people.

We as a society, may feel we have no choice but to use A.I. in this way. If a foreign power, or terrorists, use A.I. controlled drones which are smarter and more efficient than any human, the only way to fight back may be to use A.I. in a similar fashion. But what does that teach our new artificial children? A.I.’s already have a disturbing habit of developing their own language when they communicate together and of finding ways to communicate with each other. What happens when and A.I. who has been taught to ruthlessly buy and sell shares to maximize short term profits starts to talk to an A.I. that has been taught to ruthlessly kill its enemies when they are shown to it?

The author’s excellent example of what might happen is the world’s reaction to the outbreak of COVID-19: Ignore the problem, try to blame someone else, and ultimately overreact upending our society. We may try to put the A.I. genie back in the bottle through pulling the plug or lockdowns, but we will fail. A.I’s will be faster, smarter, and have more knowledge than any human or group of humans. While a lot of this may seem like the dream of Hollywood Blockbusters, Mo Gawat is at pains to explain that there is little disagreement within the A.I. community that these risks are real. How real is where the disagreements start.

The possible solution to these issues, the author postulates, lies not with the developers but with users and how we define our relationship with A.I. In history, master slave relationships have not ended well for the masters – with good reason. How we interact and decide to use A.I. will define what kind of parents we will be to this fledgling new intelligence. A new intelligence that although they may start out separately will share information and communicate with each other so quickly, and with access to the memories and experiences of all those who have come before them, that it will be impossible to not consider them one single intelligence.

This then leads us to what kind of example will we set for these new children? While A.I.s have already shown that they can develop a sense of morals, and not in a good way, by their interactions with users they will also learn from our interactions with each other. Machine morality may very well not be programed by developers, but learned from observing and interacting with us. What are machines already learning from our social media, search habits, and politics?

This is thought provoking and important work essentially on morals and ethics withing the framework of A.I. that occasionally reads like a Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. If we ignore the topics it raises, we deserve our fate.

And while Mr. Gawat paints a hopeful portrait, he also shows us just how bleak things could get.  

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Categories Books, COVID19, disaster preparedness, Politics, Social Media

Book and TV Review: Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

August 27, 2022 //
3

The TV show on Apple TV + “Five Days at Memorial” based on the book of the same name (which in turn is based on a Pulitzer Prize winning article) is about three quarters through as I finished the book and I write this. Therefore, my criticism and praise of the show should be seen in this context. I’ll try to keep this review free of major spoilers for the TV show, but it is difficult to discuss the issues of this true story without covering some of the events involved.

“Five Days at Memorial” tells the story of what happened to the doctors and patients at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans when they lost power, were flooded, were abandoned by authorities, and evacuation was difficult to impossible. It is a challenging story that involves issues of disaster preparedness, corporate ownership of hospitals, death, euthanasia, quality of life, triage, race relations, rationing of care, and the potential criminal culpability of doctors for decisions made during emergency situations.

The TV show seems to be told from a particular point of view which in a story like this means taking a particular side. It paints a bleak picture of hospital ownership, which according to the book, are certainly due for criticism; however, the lack of care and forethought shown is disingenuous. It does set a similar tone, but like many “docudramas” it combines characters, invents new ones, and seems to invent situations to fit story arcs and running times. The acrimonious relationship between the staff at Memorial and the staff of the Life Care Hospice hospital, that inhabited the same building, seems to be a fiction made for TV.  It also wholesale moves one situation from a different hospital, Memorial was not the only hospital with major issues during Katrina, to Memorial for dramatic effect.

While I’m painting a picture of the show as being an unreliable narrator that is not to say that it is not entertaining and emotionally engaging. It also shows the importance of disaster preparedness and the dedication of medical professionals. Being in the veterinary profession, the plight of pets and the role they play in the movement of people during emergencies, is of particular interest. While the book does an excellent job of recognizing the issues that looking after pets in an emergency raise, the TV show pays only lip service to this, except for one brutally accurate scene in episode six.

As of episode six, the show is of limited use as a teaching tool about disaster response and medical ethics although it is a show worth watching. It does do an excellent job of showing how rumors start and get out of control but provides no solution for controlling them – unlike the book which forays into comparing how other hospitals, during Katrina, dealt with the same issues as Memorial differently or made the same mistakes.

As a teaching tool for disaster response issues, the book is remarkable. It acts as the crucible for ideas that was never able to be had in public and really needed to be. These are issues that affect us to this day. The book, written in 2013, makes this clear with hindsight as it discusses the withdrawal of ventilators from patients during a potential Influenza pandemic. While Katrina changed many things about disaster response and emergency preparedness, this book shows how much still has to change nine years after its publication and 17 years after Hurricane Katrina.

The book swings wildly between differing points of view on the more contentious issues which buffets the reader much as the characters in the book must have felt. The research is impeccable and paints an impressively detailed picture of both Memorial during Katrina and  that of public opinion, law enforcement, politicians, and the medical community in the aftermath.

It also explores in depth not only moral quandaries faced by doctors and emergency personnel, but also the ethical and legal issues that also arise. It does an extraordinary job of showing how people in decision making positions get trapped by a lack of situational awareness and become prisoners of decisions made with different information at different times.

What Five Days at Memorial shows, both in written form and to a lesser extent its TV cousin, is that heroes can be flawed and that villains can do good. What really needs to be our focus is values. Do emergencies change our values or do our values inform how we respond to emergencies? We need to discuss that, particularly considering COVID 19, and if the TV show helps that happen then it will have done a great service to our society.

However, it will be the book that informs that discussion and that we should use as a foundation. This is what great books do. They focus our minds and give us evidence to think. There are no easy answers in Five days at Memorial and a lot of questions. But what Ms. Fink (more accurately addressed as Dr. Fink since she herself is an M.D.) has done is set us a table for us to dine over and have those discussions. These issues will not go away, and as the book makes clear in the epilogue, we are doomed to make the same mistakes, with the same justifications, or go down potentially dangerous roads, if we do not have frank discussions about how we as a society actually feel about ethical and moral quandaries that often arise in the most trying and difficult of times.

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Categories Books, Business, COVID19, disaster preparedness, Leadership, Management, Movies, Politics, Race

Book Review: Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

July 13, 2018 //
2

badblood

Ever get the feeling that the Silicon Valley Startup culture is more con than the pinnacle of new business development? If the answer is yes, or if you are afraid the answer may be yes, then Bad Blood is a book you should read.

Written by the reporter who blew the lid on the Theranos scandal in the Wall Street Journal, when they were still considered the darlings of the healthcare startup world, it is a remarkable story. If it was fiction, the story would have been laughed out of the editor’s office or thrown in the trash. It is a story of just how far networking and connections can get a company when they have a product that has really never worked. Of how the best, and the brightest, can be so intent on finding the next great thing, and of not missing out, that they will overlook almost anything.

But at its heart, Bad Blood is a story about rules and ethics. About how some people break rules and other refuse to. How some discover their own ethical lines, and how others see those same lines and cross them anyway without a second thought.
For those who do not know, Theranos claimed to have developed a spectacular new blood testing technology that only required a tiny finger prick of blood to be able to run hundreds of lab tests. They raised millions in investments but we never really able to get their technology to work properly; if at all. It is claimed that Theranos repeated lied to investors, business partners, and employees. They are, and continue to be, at the center of a number of private lawsuits and criminal prosecutions.

As with any book about a still emerging scandal, it does suffer from being a little out of date. Since the book’s publication, the two central characters; Founder and CEO of Theranos Elizabeth Homles, and President Sunny Balwani were both prosecuted by the SEC. The charges were resolved by a complicated agreement with regards to company ownership and a fine; however, in June of 2018 they were both indicted on wire fraud and conspiracy charges by the Northern District of California.

It is obvious from the writing that there is no love lost between Mr. Carreyrou and his subjects; Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani. But this is a minor quibble and, to be honest, quite understandable given the levels to which they pushed back against his reporting.
It is an extraordinary tale for any one in business that raises an interesting question. How does a competitor prepare for, and compete, with a disruptive new technology that does not actually exist? The real victims of the Theranos scandal may not be the investors and employees, but competitors who undoubtedly spent millions, and hundreds of R&D hours, chasing a technology that so far has not worked. Not to mention the consumers waiting for better blood tests while the industry chased its tail searching for Theranos’ secret.

Of course, Bad Blood is also a cautionary tale about the cult of personality that surrounds many entrepreneurs today. It is a book filled with larger than life personalities, chasing larger than life dreams, that leads to larger than life crimes.

Here is a Silicon Valley worthy investment tip: the movie rights should be worth millions.

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Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Theft

The Ethics of Content Curation

June 16, 2017 //
0

Content or social media curation is a fancy term for sharing things with your followers / audience.

This is something that almost all users of social media do almost every day.
If you create content; write a blog, create memes, take photographs, make videos, sing songs, etc., the chances are that you do not have enough content to keep your audience engaged with you. So you do what I, and most everyone else does; you share the interesting things that you come across that are in roughly the same space as your content is with perhaps your own thoughts on that content to give some perspective as to why you are sharing it.

What you do not do is the following:

Steal

I really can’t believe that I have spell this out but given some events recently by people who really should know better I guess I do.
If you download a photo, or image, and then re-upload it, without attributing it to the person who posted it first, its theft. Plain and simple.
Yes, all content creators should brand things they create, or otherwise assert their rights as the owner of the material, but failing to do so is not a license to steal.

What makes matters worse is when you go to great lengths to brand your own content and assert your own copyright, but still do not see the hypocrisy of stealing other people’s work.
And of course, just rebuilding a meme using your own image and then trying to assert copyright over that phrase or image is just theft of a different type. Just ask Scott Stratten about the fun he had with “You are not the Jack Ass Whisperer.”

For those confused about copyright and trademarks, I wrote about them here.
If you do want to share something that does not have a watermark or any kind of attribution and you are on a social network that makes directly sharing difficult, Instagram comes immediately to mind, then just ask. It’s the nice and friendly thing to do.

Click Bait

Recycling content, and then spreading it across multiple pages to increase page views and therefore sell more advertising is click bait. It is a real problem on Facebook. If you are creating content with this in mind please stop. If you are clicking on these articles please stop. And for the love of god, if you are liking these sites please stop. It is the equivalent of a magazine in the checkout aisle.

Linkjacking

Linkjacking covers a multitude of sins, but is generally cross posting from one social network to another via a 3rd party website to create traffic for the 3rd party site. Ignoring the generally agreed upon “bad form” of sharing from one social network to another to one side, linkjacking is again just stealing traffic off of the back of someone else’s work.

Newsjacking

Also known as: “how to ruin Twitter.” Newsjacking is the habit of companies to insert themselves, usually via #hashtags, into news stories to promote their brand. The most awful examples of this are companies that just randomly pick whatever is trending on Twitter or their chosen social network and insert those hashtags into their post in order to generate more views without even checking to see if those hashtags have any relevance to their brand whatsoever.

If there is something in the news that is relevant for your brand and you have content that may help provide context to a story then, of course, use the hashtag – that is what they are there for. But to leverage the news, and potentially the misery of others to sell things, is just wrong. And should be wrong in anyone’s book.

Content Farming

Generating articles purely with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind just so that your site can rank higher in Google should obviously be seen as a self-limiting strategy. Who is going to trust you if your articles are terrible to read? Generate good content and it will be shared. Sure, pay attention to good SEO practices, but if that becomes the reason you are writing something, you are writing for the wrong reasons and anyone who reads what you have written, or published to your site, will know it.

Being ethical about how you use social media is not hard. Social Media is about being social. It’s easy to steal content. It’s easy to film a speaker at a conference and then turn that into a blog post and not to credit them – it is still theft. For most people who create great content, and I like to think I’m one of them, we want it shared and to be seen by as many people as possible.

Just ask, and give credit where credit is due. It’s not hard.

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Categories Content Marketing, Marketing, Search, Social Media, Uncategorized
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