#ethics21 The Machine Is Us (and We're Broken...)

High Performance Leaders should care about ethics. We know that they don't always, but let's suppose that we can influence that in some way.

I am humbly and casually following along with the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) developed by Stephen Downes Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care and occasionally I'll share my thoughts on the course here.

The course has advanced quite far. Today I viewed The Machine Is Us, and I recommend it even if you don't want to dive into the course. We are all being affected by machine learning; the evidence is everywhere: increased conflict, advanced surveillance, and data used to aggregate enough information about each of us to influence our behavior. Often, that influence is beyond manipulation and become malicious.

Downes points out the various factors in that. People can be unkind, but programming can also blindly lead to unkindness by amplifying it. Software can be opinionated. (see slide 5 at The Machine Is Us). Efforts to counter this so far have been erratic and incomplete. Downes hints at more to come regarding how we might redirect our "weapons of math destruction" and hopefully we can learn ways to use whatever tools we rely on to go beyond trying to fix bias (it's a trap) and instead getting to the root of the situation. We do have to fix the machine, but we are also the machine.

We have to fix ourselves as well. We have to focus our inputs on healthy discourse rather than manipulation. How difficult is that? Quite so, I'd think.

But it has to start, and a good place to start is including ethical behavior in our leadership actions.

What do you think?

-- doug smith

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