Ethics can provide blueprints for good tech, but it can't implement them; ethics boards should raise awareness and drive self-criticism, not just be moral cover
Ethics can provide blueprints for good tech, but it can't implement them. — The New York Times has confirmed what some have long suspected … Tweets: @warmoth , @shaka_lulu , @rasmus_kleis , @francoisebaylis , @mantzarlis , and @dorotheabaur Tweets: Brian Warmoth / @warmoth : Good reminder that high-level ethics and policy discussions need to catch up with the actual state of current tech http://twitter.com/... Lucianne Walkowicz / @shaka_lulu : “...we need more than ethics. We need history, sociology, psychology, political science, economics, law, and the lessons of political activism.” Excellent article on what it means to conceive, create, and implement ethical practices in technology http://slate.com/... Rasmus Kleis Nielsen / @rasmus_kleis : “Ethics Alone Can't Fix Big Tech” - it is almost as if problems of power, politics, profit, and people being different+wanting different things cannot be reduced to ethics alone. http://slate.com/... Francoise Baylis / @francoisebaylis : “The result is “ethics theater”—or worse, “ethics washing”—a veneer of concern for the greater good, engineered to pacify critics and divert public attention away from what's really going on inside the A.I. sausage factories.” #ethics http://slate.com/... Alexios / @mantzarlis : +1. In her #TED2019 talk yesterday, @cward1e said “platforms are marking their own homework”. We need entirely new bodies with (a) access to data and (b) public accountability to serve as those watchdogs http://slate.com/... http://twitter.com/... Dorothea Baur / @dorotheabaur : Contains an important delineation of what #ethics can and cannot offer. It is a “specific area of inquiry with a specific purview”. It cannot substitute the law & it needs to be combined with all of the humanities & social sciences. http://slate.com/... #AIethics HT everyone
Context & Ripple Effects
This Slate argument lands in a debate that had been building all spring: critics had already charged that big tech companies were formulating AI ethics boards and principles largely as a strategy to head off government regulation (ethics boards as a shield against regulation). The piece pushes past that critique to a structural point — ethics can supply blueprints but cannot implement them, so boards earn their keep only by raising awareness and forcing self-criticism inside firms.
The timing matters because the field was already documenting how thin in-house moral authority runs: reporting on ethicists inside tech companies found their power to effect change limited even after scandals like Cambridge Analytica (ethicists' limited power inside tech firms), and researchers were warning that ethical oversight was defaulting to peer reviewers rather than dedicated bodies (oversight falling to peer reviewers).
First-order effects
- Companies running formalized ethics processes — the model Wired documented when Facebook deployed an automatic adviser to flag machine-learning bias — face pressure to show their boards change decisions, not just lend legitimacy.
- Ethicists embedded at large firms are pushed toward a self-criticism mandate, since the article defines their value as awareness-raising rather than implementation.
Second-order effects
- Smaller players are already opting out of the internal-board model entirely: Clarifai's CEO argued internal ethics officers do not suit small companies while stating the startup would one day supply autonomous weapons (Clarifai's rejection of internal ethics officers) — leaving oversight gaps exactly where the article says boards matter most.
- If boards are seen as moral cover, scrutiny shifts to whether companies adopt external checks — regulators, auditors, or academic review — instead of self-policing structures.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a split industry structure: large firms institutionalizing ethics functions whose limits are increasingly documented, and smaller firms skipping them altogether, which strengthens the case that meaningful oversight must come from outside the firms being governed.
- If in-house ethics keeps proving unable to implement its own blueprints, the debate migrates from corporate principles toward binding external governance — the outcome the ethics-as-regulation-shield critique warned about.
The trend: Tech's experiment with internal ethics boards is being judged against its own results, pushing the industry from self-written principles toward externally enforced accountability.