The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

For millennia, the Hippocratic oath has been a moral lodestar for the medical profession. In Latin, Primum non nocere. First, do no harm. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and British-Polish scientist Joseph Rotblat, a man who left Los Alamos on the grounds of conscience, argued that scientists need something similar. Social and moral responsibility was, he believed, not something any scientist could ever set aside. I agree, and we should consider a contemporary version for technologists: ask not just what doing no harm means in an age of globe-spanning algorithms and edited genomes but how that can be enacted daily in what are often morally ambiguous circumstances. Precautionary principles like this are a good first step. Pause before building, pause before publishing, review everything, sit down and hammer out the second-, third-, nth-order impacts. Find all the evidence and look at it coldly. Relentlessly course correct. Be willing to stop. Do all this not just because it says so in some form, but because it’s what’s right, it’s what technologists do. Actions like this can’t just operate as laws or corporate mantras. Laws are only national, corporate mantras transitory, too often cosmetic. They must instead operate at a deeper level whereby the culture of technology is not that just-go-for-it “engineering mindset” but something more wary, more curious about what might happen. A healthy culture is one happy to leave fruit on the tree, say no, delay benefits for however long i...

First, Do No Harmware: Toward a Hippocratic Tech Culture