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In superlatively great metaphorical behaviour, Google have cancelled their ethics board after one week - because they couldn’t get the ethics of an ethics board right vox.com/future-perfect…
This thread by @EvanSelinger on Luciano Floridi’s response is very astute - and has also made me consider some cultural factors at play. I have a slightly meandering story here
A couple of months ago I was at a silver service dinner with a hugely smart and capable woman from the US, who I admire hugely. (She’ll know who she is.) Now, British and European people live with, and maybe enjoy, the paralysing cultural fear of using the wrong fork, glass, etc.
Invisible cultural rules that can express superiority and inferiority are pretty much the tracks on which our society runs. We stay in our lane until we’ve learnt to indicate we know the rules of the posher bit of the road. Structures are deferred to at all costs. (Bear with me.)
My smart American friend looked at all the bullshit cutlery she didn’t need, picked it up and put it in the middle of the table.
As a socially mobile British person, I was shocked. Like, oh my god, she *moved* *the* *cutlery*.
As a socially mobile British person, I was shocked. Like, oh my god, she *moved* *the* *cutlery*.
Annnnd guess what. Nothing happened! My friend used the cutlery she needed and what wasn’t was cleared away.
I wonder: are British and Europeans so culturally conditioned to operate within oppressive systems (hello Brexit) that we assume you *have* to understand and operate within the system to change it? And that the only way to change systems is to infiltrate, not to dismantle?
So, “I have to take the calling and operate within the system, and through the power of debate I can change things at some time in the next 50 years,” is a very British way to think about things, and is what is politically killing us right now.
This may be a lack of moral courage, but it’s also complacency: an acceptance of order, and a failure to disrupt. If you’re at the top of that system, you perpetuate it. If you’re at the bottom, you’re conditioned to be polite and bend the rules.
I’ve got no morals or lessons here; it’s just an observation. (Believe me, if I knew how to overcome British political complacency, I’d be doing it right now.)
Perhaps the problem is that we get our moral courage from institutions (church, unions, political parties) and these have all collapsed, so we’re on our own, trying to get inside a system that has already failed. Ah, happy Friday.
