Comments on Ethics of the Future: Can technology be inherently good or evil?

@Mo and Michael, Your points about the internet h...

2010-09-03T18:11:41.975+01:00

@Mo and Michael,
Your points about the internet having been made to share information with maximum efficiency rather than as an imitation of the brain is a valid one. I guess I was trying to make the point that anything we make or do will reflect our own capabilities, whether that is the way we connect/absorb information or our imagination and experience. Not subconsciously but necessarily. But I agree that the claim internet works like the brain is a tenuous one. I only included it in the post because that article came out on the day we were discussing the concept of 'technology as an extension of ourselves'.

"The interconnectedness of what we make causes ripples that we're only just starting to understand" - I think this is very true. It's an area I'm fascinated by and will explore further in the future.

@Paul - thanks for inadvertently stimulating a very interesting debate - I look forward to more in the future :)

Hi Hemmy Nice post. Although tear making toward t...

2010-08-27T23:07:01.606+01:00

Hi Hemmy

Nice post. Although tear making toward the end...

I do tend to agree with Mo tho. The whole internet like the brain thing is true but always reported as if some subconscious urge made it so. But the brain is a set of interconnected nodes because that's the best way to ensure that if one part is damaged the rest can still function. Same with the internet. In both cases it's really a question of efficiency. The only difference is the brain resulted from evolutionary efficiency and the internet resulted from design efficiency...

Aside from that I *think* the only point I was trying to make (altho it's a while back so i might just have forgotten) is that technology reflects our desires and we shouldn't think of it as a shiny edifice of reason separated from morality. Sometimes technologists get carried away by the shininess of the technology and tend to skip the ethical questions. To me that just feels like an abdication of responsibility...

I think as people who make things it's always important to ask "what good things could come from this" and conversely "what bad things could come from this". And I think that's particularly true for the web because the interconnectedness of what we make causes ripples that we're only just starting to understand

I've only skimmed this — I'll read it prop...

2010-08-19T13:41:44.310+01:00

I've only skimmed this — I'll read it properly later — but the “brain works like the Internet” thing is silly distraction more than anything else. I can't believe people actually recite that in all ernestness.

The brain works like the Internet purely in the sense that it's a mass of seemingly-random interconnected nodes of some kind. The Web, of course, has even less structure. There are lots of things in the universe which work along these lines if you visualise them in comparable terms — in part through necessity, but the brain and the Internet (or the Web, depending upon who's drawing the comparison) are singled out because they perform what I can only really describe as knowledge processing.

Of course, the Internet doesn't do this on its own. The Internet does this because of the brains who make use of it. In these terms, the brain vs Internet thing boils down to the fact that the Internet is an aggregate of lots and lots and lots of brains. And so, if you take the people using the Internet out of the equation, brains and the Internet don't share any real properties beyond basic structure (which even then is loosely defined). Boiled down, then, this equates to “big things are made up of smaller things joined together”. This is not what you might call an earth-shattering observation, at least not in the fifty years :)

(rant over)

Interesting post. Particularly as my original reas...

2010-08-19T13:36:37.566+01:00

Interesting post. Particularly as my original reason for posting the McCluhan quote was more to make a point about moral panics. The fact that it sparked off a conversation about ethics is great, too ;-)