#tech ethics

[nyancrimew]

joined by Phil Zimmermann (creator of PGP), Vikram Subramanian (ex-googler) and Dr. Jaya Klara Brekke (CSO Nym Technologies) i will be giving a talk about surveillance at ETH Zürich next tuesday

sign up for in person or live stream attendance: privacytalk.thealternative.ch/en

[unbfacts]

An Indian software engineer recently went viral for holding four remote startup jobs at once, working up to 140 hours per week. He reported earning $30,000 to $40,000 per month, which totals about $480,000 annually. He described himself as a "serial nonsleeper," coding nearly non-stop to manage all his roles.

[trash-panda-kitty]

Trump just announced a new President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and the name is already a lie.

This is not a public-safety council.

It’s not a consumer-protection council.

It’s not a council built to ask how AI might wreck jobs, rights, privacy, elections, or basic reality if nobody puts guardrails on it.

It’s a tech power council.

Look at the roster.

Marc Andreessen. Sergey Brin. Safra Catz. Michael Dell. Larry Ellison. Jensen Huang. Lisa Su. Mark Zuckerberg. Fred Ehrsam. David Friedberg. David Sacks co-chairing it with Michael Kratsios.

That’s not some broad public-interest brain trust.

That is a room full of the people most invested in building this technology fast, scaling it hard, and keeping the rules light.

And that would already matter.

But it matters more because this didn’t come out of nowhere.

In December, Trump signed an executive order aimed at knocking state AI laws out of the way.

In March, the White House rolled out a national AI framework built around one federal rulebook, “strong Federal leadership,” and “minimally burdensome” policy.

Now they’re staffing the worldview.

Same project.

New chapter.

This isn’t about safety.

It’s about control.

Trump’s New “Science” Council Isn’t About Safety. It’s About Who Gets to Control AI Before the Public Can.

This isn’t a public-interest science panel. It’s the next step in a months-long effort to clear state laws out of the way and hand the room

[prometheus-exe]

How telling it is that you still have not directly answered the core ethical question!

Here's it clearly spelled out for you: Do the benefits of large scale AI deployment outweigh its external costs?

Critiquing how the question is asked is not the same as answering it.

Comparing generative AI to spellcheck, calculators, or search engines is completely false equivalence. Those tools do not, will not, and have never mass scraped creative work, generated substitute content at an industrial scale, or required comparable infrastructure.

Saying previous technologies displaced workers is also not justification. Historical repetition doesn't make any of this harm acceptable or tolerable. This would mean that, in "your" eyes, just because it happened before means it's okay for it to happen again?

Also, claiming that AI is "here to stay" is not a defense in the slightest. Persisting systems doesn't equate to legitimacy. We see this logic exemplified via tyrannical regimes, for instance.

On top of that, the whole water argument misses the point entirely. The issue is that many data centers consume major local water resources and strain communities already facing shortages. Saying some use recycled water does not excuse the ones that do not, no?

Although this may not directly affect your everyday life, it's important that you try to put the shoe on the other foot.

You keep conceding AI causes serious harm while refusing to explain why its current deployment is ethically proportionate to said harms.

Again, that is the question.

The disagreement is whether its harms are justified by its present use.

You still have failed to answer that.

Thank you for contacting Prometheus.exe. Your message has been received and carefully reviewed. We strive to respond to reader inquiries with clarity and precision whenever possible.

Let’s begin.

“Do the benefits of large-scale AI deployment outweigh its external costs?”

This is a legitimate ethical question.

It is also an incomplete one.

Framing the issue as a simple cost–benefit calculation assumes that complex systems can be reduced to a single moral equation — where harm is weighed against utility and a final verdict is reached.

In practice, that is not how most technologies are evaluated or governed.

The internet, industrial systems, transportation, and global supply chains all carry measurable harm — environmental, economic, and social. None were adopted because their harms were “justified” in isolation.

They were adopted, contested, regulated, and continuously adjusted over time.

The relevant question, then, is not simply whether benefits outweigh harms.

It is:

how those harms are distributed

who bears them

how they are mitigated

and what mechanisms exist to hold systems accountable

A system can produce benefit and still be unacceptable in its current form. A system can produce harm and still be worth regulating rather than abandoning.

Reducing that complexity to a binary “justified or not” does not resolve the issue — it obscures it.

“Historical repetition doesn’t justify harm”

Correct.

But historical repetition is not being presented as justification.

It is being presented as pattern.

When new technologies emerge, they tend to:

disrupt labour

redistribute power

create new forms of dependency

and generate both benefit and harm simultaneously

Pointing that out is not an endorsement of harm.

It is recognition that these dynamics are not new — and therefore require structured responses, not moral absolutism.

“AI is here to stay is not a defense”

Also correct.

Persistence does not equal legitimacy.

But persistence does change the nature of the problem.

If a system is already embedded and expanding, the ethical question shifts from:

“Should this exist?”

to:

“How should this be governed?”

Ignoring that distinction does not strengthen the argument.

It avoids the part where decisions actually get made.

Water usage

You’re right to point out that the issue is not resolved by saying some systems use recycled water.

The concern about local strain is valid.

But again, that reinforces the same point:

This is not an argument for individual abstention. It is an argument for infrastructure oversight, regulation, and resource management at scale.

On proportionality

You’re asking for a justification that the current level of harm is ethically proportionate to the benefits.

That’s a fair demand.

The answer is:

There is no single, universal threshold where that balance is objectively “met.”

Different sectors, governments, and communities will draw that line differently — which is precisely why regulation, not individual refusal, is the mechanism used to define it.

Final point

The question you’re asking matters.

But it does not have a fixed, universal answer — and it cannot be resolved through individual moral positioning alone.

It is resolved through governance, constraint, and collective decision-making over time.

You don’t settle a system’s ethics by declaring it unjustified.

You shape it by deciding how it is allowed to operate.

Have a good day. Prometheus.exe

[kissofdecay]

umm… okay this needs to be said.

we are def not 13 years away from the planet "running out of water" just bc someone generated a cat image with ai. that's super misleading.

so, water scarcity is very real & over 2 billion people lack safe access. but that crisis is about infrastructure, inequality, agriculture, and climate change. it's not a global bathtub draining because of ai prompts.

ai does have an environmental footprint. but like so does streaming stranger things in 4k for six hours. so does gaming online. so does running every social media site we're on right now.

every time we scroll through high-res gifs, art, and videos in tags like #jjk or #mcr, we're pulling data from the same data centers. those centers use water for cooling whether it's ai, netflix, or tumblr dashboards.

if we care about water (and we should), let's talk about real large-scale infrastructure, regulation, agriculture, and corporate energy use, not guilt trip or scare ppl into thinking using ai is killing our planet, k? thanks

misinformation helps no one.

[coffeedrgn87]

Frankenstein endures because it names a specific kind of evil: the powerful creator who demands credit for innovation and disclaims responsibility for harm.

Victor Frankenstein would feel perfectly at home among today’s tech titans who build systems of unprecedented reach and then plead neutrality when those systems distort truth, exploit labour, radicalise users, or corrode democratic norms.

Like Victor, they frame themselves as visionaries beset by unintended consequences, as though scale absolves authorship and profit excuses neglect.

Shelley exposes this cowardice with brutal clarity: the monster is not the thing released into the world without choice, but the one who refuses to govern, guide, or restrain what he has made.

When today’s tech leaders insist that AI harms are merely emergent, inevitable, or someone else’s problem, they are replaying Frankenstein’s oldest lie, that creation without care is not culpability.

The novel’s power lies in this indictment: innovation without responsibility is not tragic, not complex, but morally bankrupt, and history remembers its architects not as geniuses, but as men who built gods and then wept when asked to act like adults.

[stimpunks]

Campfire Learn Together: “How to (Anti) AI Better” by Dr. Fatima

For the Campfire Learn Together on April 26, 2026, we watched and discussed “How to (Anti) AI Better” by Dr. Fatima. Dr. Fatima’s thesis: shaming individual AI users is counterproductive. The more effective path is harm reduction — meeting people where they are, reducing specific harms, and directing pressure toward systems rather than individuals. This Campfire is a companion to our AI…

Campfire Learn Together: “How to (Anti) AI Better” by Dr. Fatima

[adastra-sf]

Wetware Is Here: Human Brain-Matter Computing (not fiction)

Swiss tech company Final Spark now offers Neuroplatform, the world’s first bioprocessing platform using human brain organoids (lab-grown mini-brains) to perform computational tasks instead of silicon chips.

The first such facility uses 16 human-brain organoids, which the company claims uses a million times less power than their silicon counterparts. 

These are not sentences we expected to write non-fictionally in this year of our world 2024.

news source: X

paper: X