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ETHICOMP2004 – Dr. Terrell Ward Bynum’s Abstract
This is an expanded abstract of a Keynote Address to be presented at ETHICOMP2004 in Syros, Greece in April 2004. The complete paper will be available during that event. Terrell Ward Bynum is the Director of the Research Center on Computing & Society at Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
Ethical Challenges to Citizens of “the Automatic Age”: Norbert Wiener on the Information Society
Terrell Ward Bynum
Introduction
In Chapter I of his foundational information-ethics book, The
Human Use of Human Beings (1950, 1954), Norbert Wiener said:
It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future… messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part. (p. 16)
To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society. (p. 18)
communications in society… are the cement which binds its fabric together. (p. 27)
Wiener believed that, in the coming “automatic age” (as he called today’s era), the nature of society, as well as its citizens’ relationships with society and with each other, will depend more and more upon information and communications. He predicted that, in our time, machines will join human beings in the creation and interpretation of messages and communications, and indeed in shaping the ties that bind society together. There will be, he argued, machines that learn – that gather, store and interpret information – that reason, make decisions, and take actions on the basis of the messages which they send and receive. According to Wiener, the social and ethical importance of these developments cannot be overstated. “The choice of good and evil knocks at our door,” he said. (p. 186)
Today we have entered Wiener’s “automatic age,” and it is clear that he perceptively foresaw the enormous social and ethical importance of information and communication technology (ICT). Remarkably, he even foresaw – more than a decade before the Internet was created – some of the social and ethical problems that came to be associated with the Internet. (Some examples are given below.)
Human Purposes and the Problem of Entropy
As an early twentieth-century scientist who was philosophically alert
to recent developments in physics, Wiener faced the challenge of reconciling
the existence
and importance of human purposes and values on
the one hand, and the scientific
assumption that increasing entropy– that is, growing chaos and
disorder – will eventually destroy all organized structures and
entities in the universe. In Chapter II of The
Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener described
contemporary
science’s picture of the long-term fate of the universe:
Sooner or later we shall die, and it is highly probable that the whole universe around us will die the heat death, in which the world shall be reduced to one vast temperature equilibrium… (p. 31)
In that same chapter, however, Wiener rescued his reader from pessimism and pointlessness by noting that “the heat death” of the universe will occur many millions of years in the future. In addition, in our local region of the universe, living entities and even machines are capable of reducing chaos and disorder rather than increasing it. Living things and machines are anti-entropy entities capable of creating and maintaining structure and organization locally, even if the universe as a whole is “running down” and losing structure. For millions of years into the future, therefore, human purposes and values can continue to have meaning and worth, despite the overall increase of entropy in the universe:
In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish… [Thus] the theory of entropy, and the considerations of the ultimate heat death of the universe, need not have such profoundly depressing moral consequences as they seem to have at first glance. (pp. 40-41)
Justice
and a Good Human Life
Having rescued the meaningfulness of human purposes and values, Wiener
could then discuss what would count as a good human life. To have a
good life,
human beings must live in a society where “the great human values
which man possesses” (p. 52 ) are nurtured; and this can only
be achieved, he said, in a society that upholds the “great principles
of justice.” In Chapter
VI of The Human Use of Human Beings he
stated those principles, although he did not give them names. For the
sake of clarity and ease of remembering
them,
let us attach names to Wiener’s own definitions of “the great
principles of justice”:
The Principle of Freedom – Justice requires “the liberty of each human being to develop in his freedom the full measure of the human possibilities embodied in him.” (p. 105)
The Principle of Equality – Justice requires “the equality by which what is just for A and B remains just when the positions of A and B are interchanged.” (p. 106)
The Principle of Benevolence – Justice requires “a good will between man and man that knows no limits short of those of humanity itself.” (p. 106)
Wiener considered humans to be fundamentally social beings who can reach their full potential only by active participation in a community of similar beings. For a good human life, therefore, society is indispensable. But it is possible for a society to be oppressive and despotic in ways that limit or even stifle individual freedom; so Wiener added a fourth principle of justice, which we can appropriately call “The Principle of Minimum Infringement of Freedom”: (Wiener himself did not give it a name.)
The Principle of Minimum Infringement of Freedom — “What compulsion the very existence of the community and the state may demand must be exercised in such a way as to produce no unnecessary infringement of freedom.” (p. 106)
According to Wiener, the overall purpose of a human life is the same for everyone: to realize one’s full human potential by engaging in a variety of chosen actions. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Principle of Freedom would head his list, and that the Principle of Minimum Infringement of Freedom would limit the power of the state to thwart freedom. Because the general purpose of each human life, according to Wiener, is the same, his Principle of Equality follows logically; while the Principle of Benevolence follows from his belief that human freedom flourishes best when everyone sympathetically looks out for the well-being of all.
Wiener’s Method of Doing Information Ethics
Wiener was keen to ask questions about “what we do and how we should
react to the new world that confronts us” because of ICT (p.
12). He developed strategies for analyzing, understanding, and dealing
with ICT-related
social and ethical issues that could threaten human values like life,
health, security, knowledge, happiness and creativity. Today, half
a century after
Wiener founded Information Ethics as an academic research subject,
we can look back at his early writings in this field and examine
the methods that he used
to develop his arguments and draw his conclusions. While Wiener was
busy creating Information Ethics as a new area of academic research,
he normally did not
step back – like a metaphilosopher would – and explain
to his readers what he was about the do or how he was going to do
it. Instead, he
simply jumped
right into an ICT-related ethical problem and began to analyze it
and work towards a suggested solution.
Today, in examining Wiener’s methods and arguments, we have the advantage of helpful concepts and ideas developed later by seminal thinkers like Walter Maner and James Moor. We can use their ideas here to illuminate Wiener’s methodology by examining what he did in his writings in addition to what he said there. In Chapter VI of The Human Use of Human Beings, for example, Wiener turned to the law and his own conception of justice to provide effective tools for identifying and analyzing social and ethical problems associated with ICT. From the point of view of Maner’s “Heuristic Methods for Computer Ethics” (1999) and Moor’s “What Is Computer Ethics?” (1985), we can describe Wiener’s methodology in Information Ethics as the following five-step heuristic procedure:
Step One: Identify an ethical question or case, either positive or negative, regarding the integration of ICT into society.
Step Two: Clarify ambiguous concepts or policies that may apply to the case in question. [In Moor’s language: identify and eliminate “conceptual muddles.”]
Step Three: If possible, apply existing “policies” -- as Moor would call principles, laws, rules, and practices that already govern the given society – and then use precedent and traditional interpretations of the policies to answer the question or to assimilate the new case into the existing set of policies.
Step Four: If precedent and existing interpretations are insufficient to settle the question or to assimilate the new case, one needs to revise the old policies or create new ones using “the great principles of justice” and the purpose of a human life to guide the effort. [In Moor’s language, one needs to identify “policy vacuums” and then formulate and justify new policies to fill the vacuums.]
Step Five: Answer the question or deal with the case by applying the new or revised policies.
It is important to note that this method of dealing with Information Ethics issues need not involve the expertise of a trained philosopher. In any society, a successfully functioning adult would be familiar with the laws, rules, customs, and practices (Moor’s “policies”) that normally govern one’s behavior in that society. They enable a citizen to tell whether a proposed action would be considered ethical. Thus, all those in a society who must cope ethically with the introduction of ICT – whether they be public policy makers, ICT professionals, business people, workers, teachers, parents, or others – can and should engage in Information Ethics by helping to integrate ICT into society in ways that are socially and ethically acceptable. Information Ethics, understood in this very broad way, is too vast and too important to be left only to academics or to ICT professionals. This was very clear to Wiener, who especially challenged government officials, business leaders, and public policy makers at all levels to wake up and begin to cope with the “good and evil” implications of the coming information society.
The rest of this paper will discuss, at length, several examples of Information Ethics issues (positive as well as negative) that Wiener dealt with in his writings, including the following topics:
- Machines that Learn and Make Decisions – Machines can learn, said Wiener, and thereby change their behavior based upon their past “experiences.” Woe to us humans, if we allow such machines to make our decisions for us in situations where human judgment and responsibility are crucial to a good outcome.
- War and Peace in the Information Age – If machines that play “war games” are used by governments to plan for war, or even to decide when to “push the nuclear button,” the human race may not survive the consequences.
- Robot Ethics – Decision-making machines must be governed by ethical principles that humans select. If such machines also learn from their past activities, how can we humans expect them to obey the ethical principles that we would have used to make those decisions? We need to develop a theory of robot ethics.
- “Automatic Factories” – Factories, said Wiener, will soon use a computerized information system as if it were “a central nervous system” for the factory, enabling machines to replace the physical labor of assembly-line workers, as well as many of the judgments, calculations and decisions of middle managers. Significant economic and psychological problems will emerge as a result.
- ICT for Persons with Disabilities – ICT can be used to make sophisticated artificial limbs and other helpful prostheses to replace various parts of a person’s body. Wiener and some of his colleagues worked on several projects of this kind.
- Personal Identity and the Merging of Humans and Machines – As ICT enabled prostheses and other mechanical devices merge with the human body, how will these affect our sense of personal identity – our sense of who and what we are? What will be the ethical and ontological status of various human-machine combinations that could be created in the future?
- Globalization – ICT makes it possible for someone to “act at a distance,” extending his or her causal reach as far as messages and communications can travel. If a genuinely global communications network is created, said Wiener, a person could essentially “be everywhere at once.” What would be the consequences for international relations and possible world government of such a global network?
References
Walter Maner (1999), “Heuristic Methods for Computer Ethics,”
A Keynote Speech at AICEC99, Australian Institute of Computer
Ethics Conference 1999,
Melbourne, Australia. First published in Moor, J. and
Bynum, T.W. (eds.) (2003), CyberPhilosophy: The Intersection
of Computing and Philosophy, Blackwell.
James H. Moor, (1985), “What Is Computer Ethics?,” originally published in Bynum, T.W. (ed) Computers and Ethics, Blackwell, pp. 263-275. [Published as the October 1985 issue of Metaphilosophy.]
Norbert Wiener (1954), The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, Second Edition Revised, Doubleday Anchor. [All quotations from this book are from this edition.]
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