Social Contract: Universal Guiding Principles – Me2B (3/4)

Social Contract: Universal Guiding Principles

Thursday 13B

Convener: Lisa LeVasseur & Richard Whitt

Notes-taker(s): Lisa LeVasseur & Andrew Hughes

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

1. Notes received from Lisa LeVasseur:

- John Locke quote: from The Two Treatises of Civil Government

- This is a moment in history when a lot of thought went into government – what it is, to take over what a monarch/despot used to do.

- We are in a new place here. We were in a new place when print came along.

- The social contract we have – that needs to apply online. It doesn’t.

- Other side of this spectrum is Thomas Hobbes.

- John Locke is the idealized nature of what it should be.

- The global view, has no shared understanding.

- Looking for a list of universal principles.

- Defend against approaching discussion from a single cultural viewpoint.

- Is there/should there be a set of universal principles

- Analyze the good in the world and model on that

- If it exists in the world, it can become a law (Elinor Ostrom)

- Focus on the positive reinforcement

- Do the 8 laws of ethically-designed AI.

- Universality is a western concept. There are other ways of seeing human identity. E.g. African view of I am, because you are.

- One of the key IEEE EAD1e feedback, was this was very western. And there was an effort to get and incorporate this feedback.

- The principles are very high level, you can still have disagreements on the details.

- We are in a battle about what the dominant narratives are for the future.

- China social contract – that was the birth of the Chinese nation.

- 400 BC reforms of sheng yang led to foundation of China 222BC

- Everyone is in a group of 5 able bodied men. If someone did something bad, you all got punished, if someone did good they all got credit and benefit.

- Defend the smallest social unit of responsibility + ingrained in. Feeling of safety in group rather than the individual.

- Mai Lin, shared the Chinese model, it’s an accountability model. It’s completely non-tech.

- Is this technology itself the. Problem?

- Need a slow food movement for tech

- What are the embedded moral foundations that are at the root of the “bad”

- E.g. productization, monetization

- Tech is simply our current framing. This is not simply tech.

- Has the tech caused a disconnect between the action and the harm?

- What is the right kind of accountability that needs to reemerge?

- The nature of the digital world is fundamentally different from the natural world. Suddenly nature is changing at this (fashion) speed. We are in a completely different field.

- Agile is cultivation of sloppiness.

- What I see missing, different incentives. The incentive became a burden, and in that story it is about protecting the other 4. Can we find commonalities about aligning incentives?

- You could plug in, pick your favorite religion for the stating point of the discussion – we use social contract.

- In real life there is deternance, but we don’t have that online, and that’s a problem.

- What if you have a bot, that is programmed to do things, and it’s programmed to break the norms and it does some harm?

- Dan Ariely – Skin in the game book – when you have skin in the game it changes your behavior in the system.

- More foundations theory, feels male and legal… this bias might be due to my presenting of them (I’m male, western, legal).

Example Models

Ethically Aligned Design Principles: IEEE EAD1e

1. Human Rights
2. Wellbeing
3. Data Agency
4. Effectiveness
5. Transparency
6. Accountability
7. Awareness of Misuse
8. Competence

Social/Institutional Constraints on behavior

• It looks like there is a filter at each level?
• Is that filter thing true?
• Is there one principle that guides us in the selection of this filter?
• There is interaction between the layers
• These are layers of abstraction

Moral Foundation Theory

These are the dimensions we care about. Good/Bad. What does it mean to do these things online?

• Care/Harm
• Fairness/Cheating
• Loyalty/Betrayal
  • You expect the website you are trusting will not screw you
• Authority/Subversion (Golden Rule)
  • Don’t hack, don’t spread malware
• Sanctity/Degradation
  • There will be religions (open source, android), there are things that are sacred.
  • Translate this into respect
• + Liberty/Oppression
  • Open source vs non-open source

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Go and read the actual theory.

Bring your own perspective to the discussion.

What we’re missing here, is

• We’re all talking about technology
• We want them to succeed
• Technology itself is a problem, and needs to be stuffed back in the box, by slowing it down.

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2: Photos received from Andrew Hughes:

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