John Weckert’s research while affiliated with Charles Sturt University and other places

Around the turn of this century a number of emerging technologies were in the news, raising some potentially significant ethical questions. Given that they were emerging they as yet had no, or very few, impacts, so it was not obvious how best to assess them ethically. Jim Moor addressed this issue and offered three suggestions for a better ethics for emerging technologies. His first was that ethics should be dynamic, that is, it should be an ongoing process before, during and after the technological development. Second, there should be close collaboration between the researchers and developers on the one hand, and ethicists and social scientists on the other. Finally, ethical analyses should be more sophisticated. In this paper I argue that environmental issues and the questioning of core ethical values should be a central part of the ethics of emerging technologies, using AI examples. Given the kind of beings that we are, technology and the environment are closely connected for human flourishing.

The ethics of technology is not as effective as it should. Despite decades of ethical discussion , development and use of new technologies continues apace without much regard to those discussions. Economic and other forces are too powerful. More focus needs to be placed on the values that underpin social attitudes to technology. By seriously looking at Indigenous thought and comparing it with the typical Western way of seeing the world, we can gain a better understanding of our own views. The Indigenous Filipino worldview provides us with a platform for assessing our own core values and suggests modifications to those values. It also indicates ways for broadening and altering the focus of the ethics of technology to make it more effective in helping us to use technologies in ways more conducive to human well-being.

We have a technology fetish. That is, we have an excessive and irrational devotion or commitment to new technologies. This fetish matters. New technologies are too often developed and accepted with little critical thought. After a discussion of the fetish it will be argued that it is not inevitable and that something should be done about it because of potential harms. Finally, suggestions are made for alleviating the potential for those harms. Monitoring and surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence are used to illustrate the argument.

Claims have been made that the current COVID-19 pandemic is a message from nature to stop exploiting the earth to the extent that we have been. While there is no direct evidence that this pandemic is a result of human actions with respect to the earth, ample evidence exists that deforestation and other environmental changes, together with climate change, do make it more likely that viruses will cross from wildlife to humans. We humans are mammals and our welfare depends on the health of the earth. We are not so different from other living creatures in this regard. It is in our interests to look after the earth, something that Indigenous Australians knew well. Mother Earth must be cared for if she is to care for us. Nature perhaps is sending us a message in the same sense that my car does if I do not maintain it. It stops functioning properly. We have to modify nature to satisfy our needs but we must be careful how we modify it.