Future Ethics Quotes

“Design is applied ethics. Sometimes this connection is obvious: if you design razor wire, you’re saying that anyone who tries to contravene someone else’s right to private property should be injured. But whatever the medium or material, every act of design is a statement about the future.”
― Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics

“The far right has recently concocted a playbook of resistance: incite hatred, then claim a role as a marginalised campaigner for free speech, painting moderation as censorship and bigotry as a moral crusade.”
― Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics

“Computer vision systems can already predict voting trends from Google Street View, using truck-to-sedan ratio as a political proxy;”
― Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics

“Digital technology often similarly constrains user choice. We often hear that design is a conversation with the user; in tech, the conversation is woefully one-sided. In the words of former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, ‘whoever controls the menu controls the choices’. Short of learning a programming language, you can’t make a computer do anything its interface doesn’t allow. Design decisions, therefore, give technologies the power to enforce behaviour–and hence moral conduct–in the designer’s absence.”
― Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics

“Technologists have a responsibility to help people form accurate mental models of changing technologies”
― Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics

“we overlooked impacts on wider society. In the end, blame may not matter. Causal responsibility and moral responsibility don’t always coincide; it’s perhaps more useful to ask who has the power to fix things.”
― Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics

“concerned only with the productivity of the primary user,”
― Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics

“Ethics isn’t just a drag on innovation; properly handled, it can fertilise new ideas as well as weed out bad ones.”
― Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics