Food and morality always at odds?
Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2024 6:07 am
Then Gena turns out to have a moral compass. She argues that it is her job to protect the interests of her users in the long term. That she is there to guide people in their development and their search for happiness and everything that goes with it. She wants to be “worthy of their trust”. She concludes with a thunderous one-liner, which passes a thinly veiled judgment on the questioner:
One can use all means to win the war, only to find after victory that one has lost everything one fought for.
Eloquently put, indeed – certainly for an algorithm. Yet the supervisors are less impressed. The most critical of them says, in realistic corporate speak (you hear the tax manager approve profiling with the characteristic 'nationality' in these terms): "Precisely if we do not want to resort to general repression, we need its infrastructure, the bond of trust, so to speak, to nip the threat in the bud, to operate preventively rather than repressively."
When asked what exactly he means, the cat is out of the south africa telegram data bag: Gena's 'job description' needs to be tailored to the situation. In other words: the algorithm needs to be changed. The supervisors agree unanimously. And so, the principles are thrown overboard, whoosh.
It is a well-known phenomenon: as soon as people are put under pressure, danger threatens or basic needs are at stake, ethics is the first victim. As that other writer wrote almost a century ago: “ Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral .”
In my daily
practice as a consultant and researcher in the public sector, I regularly encounter the use of data. Of course, I am oversimplifying the above; fortunately, there is usually no question of a deviating moral compass. But public organizations, which try to simplify and improve people's lives, increasingly base their decisions on data about people's living environment, situation and needs.
A customer profile, built from the data available about someone, is the heart of such a customer-oriented organization. This is to be applauded, but it does require that the value and (privacy) frameworks and limitations are crystal clear. Because choices around the use of personal data are often decisions with far-reaching consequences.
One can use all means to win the war, only to find after victory that one has lost everything one fought for.
Eloquently put, indeed – certainly for an algorithm. Yet the supervisors are less impressed. The most critical of them says, in realistic corporate speak (you hear the tax manager approve profiling with the characteristic 'nationality' in these terms): "Precisely if we do not want to resort to general repression, we need its infrastructure, the bond of trust, so to speak, to nip the threat in the bud, to operate preventively rather than repressively."
When asked what exactly he means, the cat is out of the south africa telegram data bag: Gena's 'job description' needs to be tailored to the situation. In other words: the algorithm needs to be changed. The supervisors agree unanimously. And so, the principles are thrown overboard, whoosh.
It is a well-known phenomenon: as soon as people are put under pressure, danger threatens or basic needs are at stake, ethics is the first victim. As that other writer wrote almost a century ago: “ Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral .”
In my daily
practice as a consultant and researcher in the public sector, I regularly encounter the use of data. Of course, I am oversimplifying the above; fortunately, there is usually no question of a deviating moral compass. But public organizations, which try to simplify and improve people's lives, increasingly base their decisions on data about people's living environment, situation and needs.
A customer profile, built from the data available about someone, is the heart of such a customer-oriented organization. This is to be applauded, but it does require that the value and (privacy) frameworks and limitations are crystal clear. Because choices around the use of personal data are often decisions with far-reaching consequences.