I used to work at a company where they were pretty preoccupied in selling Ethical AI. They had a Responsible Tech committee, where they were responsible to push for better usage of technology. And yet they would sell cloud computing solutions and AI. Bull-shit.

Technology doesn't exist in a void. Technology is not neutral. If some harmful technology exists, they it will be used for harm.

Of course, some tech that was created for one purpose have been repurposed for evil. Take cars, for example: they are supposed to take us from A to B. Yet, there are violent drivers in the world, who use their cars as guns.

There are, of course, some technologies that only exist for evil, e.g. nuclear bombs and guns. Their sole purpose is to do harm and oppression.

Now, let's go back to Nazi Germany: IBM, the big tech at the time, invented the Hollerith Machine [1]. Even nowadays, in my country, we call the paycheck "Holerite". This punch-card technology, at first, was created for doing the Census - counting the population. Not evil, right? Well, it was also used by the nazi regime for counting jewish people... [2]

What if we lived in a world where such attrocity still existed? Well, we don't have to go so far [3] - Google's project Nimbus, a face-recognition technology, is already being used by Israel on the genocide that's happening in Gaza.

I don't even want to talk about the terrible misusage of AIs and social networks. We know which things I'm talking about - from producing disgusting content with children to alt-right fake news, and having to submit content moderators to terrible, awful content to ensure that we don't see such disturbing things while watching cat videos.

Do you still think that there's such thing as ethical AI and social media regulations? I call it bs. I think that, just like firearms and nuclear weapons, these techs should be banned. We should refrain from using these, we should push for general ban of such tech, or at least ensure that we, as the people, take these technologies away from the capitalists.

Technology should serve us and be controlled by us, not by corporations and governments trying to maintain the status quo. Only when we take control of technology that we can ensure this tech can be used for good.

If you're a developer like me, try to be conscious of the kind of technology you're doing: you may be creating more harm than good.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/history/punched-card-tabulator

[2] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ibm-and-quot-death-s-calculator-quot-2

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/23/what-is-project-nimbus-and-why-are-google-workers-protesting-israel-deal