The ethical frameworks in technology

Chernobyl disaster

Oxford Languages gives the following two definitions to the word Ethics:

Moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity.

The branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles.

The Wikipedia gives the following definition:

A branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior.

Since Aristotle wrote two (or three) books on ethics (the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and perhaps the Magna Moralia or Great Ethics), ethics has been considered an important part of philosophy.

Traditionally, three main approaches have been considered (there are more) that can serve as a framework for the construction of ethics:

Mathematical trivia and quotes from mathematicians

I have taken the following trivia and quotes about mathematics from the book A Passion for Mathematics, by Clifford A. Pickover, which I have mentioned in another post in this blog. These are the trivia:

• Let's see four amazing properties of number 5: a) It is the hypotenuse of the smallest Pythagorean triangle. b) There are five Platonic solids. c) It is the smallest automorphic number. Automorphic numbers are those whose square ends in the number. d) It is probably the only odd untouchable number. Untouchable numbers are those that are not equal to the sum of the proper divisors of any other number.

Computer programs and intelligence games

In 1956, John McCarthy and colleagues, in a seminar that took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover (USA), defined the term Artificial Intelligence, so abused now. On the same year, Arthur Samuel, working at IBM, built the first computer program capable of playing checkers. This program kept information about the games it had played and used it to modify its future plays. In other words, it “learned.” After a certain number of games, the program was able to defeat its creator and play reasonably well in official championships.

At first sight, this seemed to go in the good direction. The creators of the term Artificial Intelligence had predicted that ten years later (that is, around 1966) we would have programs capable of performing perfect translations between any two human languages and playing chess better than the world champion. And this would only be the beginning. We would soon be able to build machines capable of behaving with equal or more intelligence than man. The old dream of building artificial men would have come true.

Information and intelligence

Von Neumann’s architecture, which applies to almost every computer ever built during the history of computing, builds computers from two clearly separate parts: the processing unit, where instructions are executed, and the memory, where data is stored. Consequently, almost all the programs we run on our computers are divided into two different sections: the algorithm (the executable instructions) and the data that provides the information needed by the algorithm (its input).

Such a clear separation reminds the difference between the two concepts in the title of this post:

Historical quantification of violence

Auchswitz

In a recent conference that I heard, the speaker said that in recent times violence in the world has decreased a lot. She added that many people have the feeling that it is the other way around, that we have now more violence than ever before. Is what she said true, or is what people think true?

Let’s start by defining violence. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines it like this: An act of physical force that causes or is intended to cause harm.