As I navigate the final semester of studies at the University of Edinburgh, I approach the daunting task of writing my futures project. The thesis represents the culmination of everything learned over the last two years, with a healthy dash of original thinking that seeks to expand the larger scholarship of AI Ethics. I use the word “daunting” not because I believe I am incapable of accomplishing this feat, but because identifying—and committing—to a single theme representing your abilities is no easy task.
As I’ve stated in previous posts, my original idea was to look at the ethical implications of AI on creative professionals. This is a topic I emphasized and one I still believe to be important. But as I progressed in my coursework while simultaneously progressing in my career, a new idea took hold of me, one that I believe was equally important and had the potential to be even more transformative. The shorthand for this idea is what I call “Ethics as a Skillset.” It’s this idea I took to my advisor with the hopes of validating the idea and also to help give it more shape. The theme I presented was immediately validated. Over the course of an hour, my advisor shared with me many ideas on how to bring my idea to life, but two crucial decisions were made that day, which invariably shaped the direction of my future project.
The first was the realization that for Ethics as a Skillset to work, it had to take a poly-ethical approach, focusing on creating a decision-making methodology rather than teaching some codified moral theory. This starkly contrasted with how I was thinking about approaching the future project previously, which was rooted in the Aristotelean theme of virtue ethics. But after reflecting upon it more deeply, I came to the realization that ethics, no matter how well-intentioned, always runs the risk of becoming politicized. Therefore, I had to find a way to create it in such a way that it avoids the risk of it being summarily dismissed as some left-wing political agenda.
The second idea my advisor helped me to understand is that it was better to focus on creating a single, detailed learning module rather than try to create an entire curriculum. They encouraged me to focus on creating a minimum viable product (MVP) that brought the idea to life, rather than speak abstractly about a broader range of topics that would lack detail, and likely, credibility. Therefore, I decided to focus on developing a single learning module called “Ethical Debugging,” which is a system for identifying (and fixing) different ethical vectors, much like bug vectors in software development.
The major takeaway from the meeting with my advisor was the realization that my futures project needed to be in service of making decisions. Not better decisions, which implies a form of ethical judgment, but simply decision-making, which could incorporate business thinking and tools in combination with ethical thinking and judgment. And as I thought about this more, I realized that Ethics as a Skillset is all about putting ethics into action, not about adding more rules or guidelines. This is why I rewrote the title Ethics as a Skill Set: Shifting from Compliance to Competence.