Jargogled Impressions.

On Technology’s Moral Compass

There is usually a moral compass everyone carries with himself. This compass drive how you treat the behavior you encounter, across your own behaviors and those of the people you interact with. A breach is usually an event as it forces you to consider the logical boundaries of your compass. Boundaries are tested often in the world we live in today. The influx of information and news are staggering, and they carry with them a reckoning of our concepts of normalcy and of moral righteousness.

Our compass changes through both internal and external stimuli. Internal drivers of change are natural (age, death, birth) or unnatural (consciousness, self-abnegation). External sources of change are fake and irredeemable with common causes ranging across envy, jealousy, anger, and repugnance.

It’s funny how requirements of discipline and of determination affect different philosophies differently. Empathy calls for a flexible mindset with little to no discipline in how you interpret actions of other people. It calls for an unyielding trust and belief in the goodness of other people. Ambition calls for a sort of dedication and rigid focus on success. Opinions are usually the legerdemain of intellectuals opining on all things under the sun. An intellectual that sways with the wind is usually type casted as phony. Even as most public intellectuals merely sense an incoming wave or trend a trickle sooner than the commoners and capitalize on it. Rare are the intellectuals that reflect on modern human condition through an objective and non-selfish lens. We appreciate the moral compass these intellectuals bring during those dinner table conversations.

As a metaphor, moral compass is descriptive. A compass is a tool used by humans to navigate and orient themselves physically in the world. The magnetic compass aligns itself through its interactions with the earth’s magnetic field. In this sense, the compass is driven by the external, naturally occurring stimuli that the mother earth provides. The magnetic north isn’t the same as the true north. Magnetic declination refers to the mismatch between the actual north and the magnetic north. Or, to put it in our context, when looked at the zeitgeist to drive our morality barometer we are following the magnetic compass. But when moral compass is driven from within, the true north is what drives the direction.

There’s an active agency some people adopt to constantly evolve their mental compass and keep it in sync with the day to day trends. Moral compasses, as with sociology, are constructs of the time and the age we live in. They change throughout our lifetime, driven by changes both internal to the society and externally, driven by technological, societal, political, and cultural shifts.

The more you are exposed to diverse viewpoints, the broader your compass becomes. As if it’s rubber that stretches itself under pressure and stays flaccid afterwards, able to accommodate new ideas and perspectives. Moral compass stretches across individual (empathy and fairness) and societal (loyalty, respect, simplicity) dimensions and primarily focused on administering the spectrum of moral condiments across our daily affairs. In most cases, the compass becomes ingrained in our modes of being that we cease to invoke them most of the times and they become shadows that guide many of our actions.

Several decisions we make are guided by this hidden moral compass. Our fealty towards the embedded moral discourses we are taught from young age makes us abhor anything that attempts to breach those sacred, foundational beliefs. And yet, we fail to understand the same rigidity in others when it comes to their own moral compass. If its so hard to relinquish, is deeply ingrained in our psyche, and come from a wide variety of differing circumstances, it’s surprising that we don’t quickly realize the distance that moral compass covers before being relevant to its user.

If moral compass is like an enabling technology, it requires its own set of paradigms and architecture for it to really make a dent in the ways of our thinking. Like technology, there’s always a right, optimum time for deploying moral compass in our lives. Like technology that is emerging and does not yet has the ecosystem and understanding to make a real impact, moral questions that are outside the core familiar space we naturally inhabit (e.g., AI, genetic engineering, cloning, longevity, and plastic surgery) becomes difficult to digest. Technologies inevitably climb a steep evolutionary curve before they either recede, climb to their chosen mantle, or continue to grow with time. Likewise, moral compass evolves with time and age as we progress through the advanced stages of age. As a technology becomes more commonplace, focus shifts from its usefulness to its reliability. As functionality becomes table stakes, performance and scalability becomes critical. In a similar vein, with moral compasses, the applicability of a moral capsule inevitably tends to shift focus to its applicability elsewhere. Focus also shifts from its relevance in the world we live in, to its performance and applied undertaking elsewhere.

Technological imperatives are usually driven by hard problems around macro (global warming, inequality, universal healthcare) and micro (cancer and other critical diseases) environments. Moral compass, in every generation and age, strives to solve for the hardest problems of ethics, existence, justice, and truth. We have for long tried in vain to tame the tempestuous streams of moral conundrums that has existed with or without these modern technological constructs. Modern day discussions around the morality behind the choices that Autonomous vehicles must make to navigate the highroads of human transport isn’t new. As with technology, moral compass must solve for its own set of hard problems distinct for every age.

Solving for the moral choices behind the navigation of autonomous vehicles may end up relying on moral compass to drive decisions and yet will be fraught with competing and often contrasting notions of what constitutes the optimum moral compass and what forces should drive the oscillation of this gyroscope. Striving for the magnetic north may be optimum but may end up jeopardizing our race in the longer run.  Machine ethics as we know it today will be driven as much by objective understanding of machine capabilities as it will be by the inherent biases that the all too human designers would bring to bear. As role of technology expands in the world we create for ourselves, the moral compass of technical designers will scale across the devices they father. How these morals branch out into the network will define our future role on this planet.