Making me uneasy right now: tech "solutionism" extending to tech ethics. I've spoken to several tech teams, in different organisations, who are developing their own ethics principles/frameworks without doing any ethics research or engaging with ethicists. 1/
The terminology can be alienating, and there are rarely clear answers, but choosing not to acquaint yourself with the field at *all* in translating ethics for tech is...naive at best, arrogant/ignorant at worst.
I'm not an ethicist, but in the course of investigating AI ethics I've learnt *so much* from business ethicists, public service ethicists, classical ethicists. About how ethics principles have been applied and when things go wrong. These help me make my thoughts sharper.
I should stress the solutioneering attitude isn't universal. But if your org has commissioned its technical arm to develop an ethics code, and they can't meaningfully describe the ethical literature they've analysed, or experts they've spoken to, that should ring alarm bells.
Critical thinking is *core* to ethical decision-making. If the team designing your AI or data ethics framework can't do it, what kind of ethics framework do you think it will be?
Finally: if you are writing an AI/data ethics framework and yet still describing your job as "simply putting other peoples' ideas into code", you have fundamentally missed the point of ethics.
