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ACM Code of Ethics, Big Tech, cacm, complexity, cultural context, ethical crisis, Evolution of Complexity, information, Knowledge, Life, Moshe Y.Vardi, population, public good, review, survive, unethical, value reference point, view of life, working hypothesis

REVIEW & DISCUSSION of the text “I Was Wrong about the Ethics Crisis” by Moshe Y.Vardi, CACM January 2025, p.5

( May 19, 2025 – May 20, 2025)

How can we understand the current ethics debate in the tech world?
Starting from a contribution by Moshe Y. Vardi, this text analyzes the background of the so-called “ethics crisis” in the technology sector and develops an extended dynamic perspective that incorporates cultural, systemic, and evolutionary dimensions.

CONTEXT

This text belongs to the overall theme REVIEWS.

INTRODUCTION

In the section “vardi’s insights” of the CACM Moshe Y. Vardi states January 2025, that he had in January 2019 a wrong understanding of the ethical-crisis vibe in 2018, because he assumed, that it would be enough, to install as remedy a public policy with appropriate laws and regulations.[*]

To issue laws and regulations is one thing, but what does this help if the impact of the new computing technology in everyday life is negative? What if the impact of market power is too strong for the political parties to install effective laws and regulations to weaken bad implications? What if the everyday ‘view’ of the new technology is forgetting the humans themselves and is focusing instead on the new technology as the main good? What does it help in such a situation to have an ‘ethical star’ in the format of the “ACM’s Code of Ethics” [1] as guiding principle which is using words like ‘public good’, ‘social responsibility’ or the ‘quality of working life’?

Vardi locates these questions to exemplify in the working environment of a Big Tech company which as such can be unethical and where the human actor has always to deliberate, when and what to ‘optimize more’ : the ‘me’ or the ‘we’, and what has this to do with the ‘public good’?

And Vardy points out, that the ‘lack of being ethical’ of a Tech company will usually not be ‘healed automatically’ by the market. This implies that a ‘worker’ who needs money by working can be cast in a real dilemma: working in an unethical company and getting money to enable his individual life, or not working and being left alone without money.

Vardi draws from this the conclusion : “By and large, Big Tech workers do not seem to be asking themselves hard questions, I believe, hence my conclusion that we do indeed suffer from an ethics crisis”.

DISCUSSION

The concept of ‘public good’

This sketch of an ‘ethic crisis’ by Vardi raises some questions. Let us start with the concept of the ‘public good’. This concept is used as the primary point of reference for all other subsequent ethical opinions.

The ‘concept as such’ has no meaning. To be able to offer some meaning it needs a sufficient rich cultural context of associated other concepts and expressions, offering known meanings for usage.

These ‘cultural contexts’ are located in a great variety of global dimensions or are limited nationwide or are locally restricted. Furthermore there are different kinds of social formats rooted in different religious or philosophical or whatever traditions. Which one of these should be selected as the ‘official main point of reference’?

Leaving out the necessary discussion to clarify all these possible options a ‘working hypothesis’ will be formulated here as a proposal accompanied by some discussion.

A possible working hypothesis

To master the great variety of possible ‘value reference points’ out of the history one could simply ask, which conditions are necessary for some human actor to ‘survive’ in this world located on the planet earth.

A simplified argument could run as follows: an individual actor cannot survive, but the ‘life’ manifested as a population can somehow survive as a population. And the population of homo sapiens actors can only survive as part of the bigger population of all living systems on this planet earth. And the ‘whole Life’ on the planet – as part of the solar system and even more … — is characterized by a collection of physical properties and dynamics which all together define a ‘process’, whereby life is developing. As far as we understand today this ‘process of Life’ enables a development of an increasing variety of systems associated with an increasing complexity of these, thereby demonstrating furthermore a clear acceleration in the development of complexity. Part of this development is the outgrowth of different kinds of ‘tools’, which are enhancing the ability of life to change the environment physically as well as in the dimension of ‘knowledge’ (‘knowledge’ is here more than ‘information’).

To that extend that the complexity of ‘systems of life’ has surpassed the level of mastering free symbolic communication associated with recursive processes of abstractions, with emotions as well as with the ability of coordination of actions between different brains, a population of such systems can generate ‘abstract models’ of themselves within some environment, related to some ‘possible goals’. These elaborated models and goals can then be used as ‘values for a common survival’.

In such a context the concept of a ‘public good’ can gain some ‘real meaning’ associated with such models or goals. As far as these models and goals can be traced to the ‘real world’ one can ‘measure’ the quality of such models and goals with regard to their ‘success in the real world’. In this scenario a ‘measurable public good’ seems to be possible accompanied with a minimum of rationality.

Because of the natural ‘finiteness’ of constructed knowledge in the format of dynamic models with goals it can happen, that within the same ‘time interval’ more than one model exists with assumed changes and goals. This ‘plurality’ in views can be understood as a necessary condition of a ‘multi-path search process’ for a more ‘integrated view of life in the universe’.

Distributed ethical responsibility

In this view of a ‘dynamic concept of public good’ the individual worker in a tech company would not per se be responsible for the more general structures of a company, of a market or even of a whole nation. The responsibility for ‘ethical structures’ and ‘ethical processes’ has to be located on different levels of organization each with only a limited responsibility. In a real democracy an individual worker could vote in elections for those people, which support a more advanced ethical perspective – if there exist such people at all –, whereas an individual worker within a full autocratic system has no legal option.

An open future

As we know from everyday experience and from history there is no guaranty that there are enough people to find and support the ‘optimal dynamic models with goals’ to enable a good process of survival for ‘all life’. Thus it is an ever ongoing complex process to find the right definition of the ‘public good’. Knowing this it is highly questionable to present a ‘Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct’ without reference to the real process which ‘generates’ such a code. Without an explicit hint to such a generating process it seems to be a great danger to produce the illusion, that such a ‘Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct’ is an answer to important questions whereby it is possibly only a collection of empty words.

[*] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3709024

[1] https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

brain, built-in freedom, cognitive, cognitive objects, communication, complexity, conscious, consciousness, entangled states, Future, homo sapiens, human actor [HA], inside, Knowledge, language, language - everyday L0, language processing, learning, mankind, memory, neural events, neural process, open unknown future, outside, planet earth, prediction, Probability, problem, problem document, problem phase, time slicing, unconscious, unconsciousness, vision, vision statement

HMI Analysis for the CM:MI paradigm. Part 2. Problem and Vision

Integrating Engineering and the Human Factor (info@uffmm.org)
eJournal uffmm.org ISSN 2567-6458, February 27-March 16, 2021,
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

Last change: March 16, 2021 (minor corrections)

HISTORY

As described in the uffmm eJournal  the wider context of this software project is an integrated  engineering theory called Distributed Actor-Actor Interaction [DAAI] further extended to the Collective Man-Machine Intelligence [CM:MI] paradigm.  This document is part of the Case Studies section.

HMI ANALYSIS, Part 2: Problem & Vision

Context

This text is preceded by the following texts:

Introduction

Before one starts the HMI analysis  some stakeholder  — in our case are the users stakeholder as well as  users in one role —  have to present some given situation — classifiable as a ‘problem’ — to depart from and a vision as the envisioned goal to be realized.

Here we give a short description of the problem for the CM:MI paradigm and the vision, what should be gained.

Problem: Mankind on the Planet Earth

In this project  the mankind  on the planet earth is  understood as the primary problem. ‘Mankind’ is seen here  as the  life form called homo sapiens. Based on the findings of biological evolution one can state that the homo sapiens has — besides many other wonderful capabilities — at least two extraordinary capabilities:

Outside to Inside

The whole body with the brain is  able to convert continuously body-external  events into internal, neural events. And  the brain inside the body receives many events inside the body as external events too. Thus in the brain we can observe a mixup of body-external (outside 1) and body-internal events (outside 2), realized as set of billions of neural processes, highly interrelated.  Most of these neural processes are unconscious, a small part is conscious. Nevertheless  these unconscious and conscious events are  neurally interrelated. This overall conversion from outside 1 and outside 2 into neural processes  can be seen as a mapping. As we know today from biology, psychology and brain sciences this mapping is not a 1-1 mapping. The brain does all the time a kind of filtering — mostly unconscious — sorting out only those events which are judged by the brain to be important. Furthermore the brain is time-slicing all its sensory inputs, storing these time-slices (called ‘memories’), whereby these time-slices again are no 1-1 copies. The storing of time-sclices is a complex (unconscious) process with many kinds of operations like structuring, associating, abstracting, evaluating, and more. From this one can deduce that the content of an individual brain and the surrounding reality of the own body as well as the world outside the own body can be highly different. All kinds of perceived and stored neural events which can be or can become conscious are  here called conscious cognitive substrates or cognitive objects.

Inside to Outside (to Inside)

Generally it is known that the homo sapiens can produce with its body events which have some impact on the world outside the body.  One kind of such events is the production of all kinds of movements, including gestures, running, grasping with hands, painting, writing as well as sounds by his voice. What is of special interest here are forms of communications between different humans, and even more specially those communications enabled by the spoken sounds of a language as well as the written signs of a language. Spoken sounds as well as written signs are here called expressions associated with a known language. Expressions as such have no meaning (A non-speaker of a language L can hear or see expressions of the language L but he/she/x  never will understand anything). But as everyday experience shows nearly every child  starts very soon to learn which kinds of expressions belong to a language and with what kinds of shared experiences they can be associated. This learning is related to many complex neural processes which map expressions internally onto — conscious and unconscious — cognitive objects (including expressions!). This mapping builds up an internal  meaning function from expressions into cognitive objects and vice versa. Because expressions have a dual face (being internal neural structures as well as being body-outside events by conversions from the inside to body-outside) it is possible that a homo sapiens  can transmit its internal encoding of cognitive objects into expressions from his  inside to the outside and thereby another homo sapiens can perceive the produced outside expression and  can map this outside expression into an intern expression. As far as the meaning function of of the receiving homo sapiens  is sufficiently similar to the meaning function of  the sending homo sapiens there exists some probability that the receiving homo sapiens can activate from its memory cognitive objects which have some similarity with those of  the sending  homo sapiens.

Although we know today of different kinds of animals having some form of language, there is no species known which is with regard to language comparable to  the homo sapiens. This explains to a large extend why the homo sapiens population was able to cooperate in a way, which not only can include many persons but also can stretch through long periods of time and  can include highly complex cognitive objects and associated behavior.

Negative Complexity

In 2006 I introduced the term negative complexity in my writings to describe the fact that in the world surrounding an individual person there is an amount of language-encoded meaning available which is beyond the capacity of an  individual brain to be processed. Thus whatever kind of experience or knowledge is accumulated in libraries and data bases, if the negative complexity is higher and higher than this knowledge can no longer help individual persons, whole groups, whole populations in a constructive usage of all this. What happens is that the intended well structured ‘sound’ of knowledge is turned into a noisy environment which crashes all kinds of intended structures into nothing or badly deformed somethings.

Entangled Humans

From Quantum Mechanics we know the idea of entangled states. But we must not dig into quantum mechanics to find other phenomena which manifest entangled states. Look around in your everyday world. There exist many occasions where a human person is acting in a situation, but the bodily separateness is a fake. While sitting before a laptop in a room the person is communicating within an online session with other persons. And depending from the  social role and the  membership in some social institution and being part of some project this person will talk, perceive, feel, decide etc. with regard to the known rules of these social environments which are  represented as cognitive objects in its brain. Thus by knowledge, by cognition, the individual person is in its situation completely entangled with other persons which know from these roles and rules  and following thereby  in their behavior these rules too. Sitting with the body in a certain physical location somewhere on the planet does not matter in this moment. The primary reality is this cognitive space in the brains of the participating persons.

If you continue looking around in your everyday world you will probably detect that the everyday world is full of different kinds of  cognitively induced entangled states of persons. These internalized structures are functioning like protocols, like scripts, like rules in a game, telling everybody what is expected from him/her/x, and to that extend, that people adhere to such internalized protocols, the daily life has some structure, has some stability, enables planning of behavior where cooperation between different persons  is necessary. In a cognitively enabled entangled state the individual person becomes a member of something greater, becoming a super person. Entangled persons can do things which usually are not possible as long you are working as a pure individual person.[1]

Entangled Humans and Negative Complexity

Although entangled human persons can principally enable more complex events, structures,  processes, engineering, cultural work than single persons, human entanglement is still limited by the brain capacities as well as by the limits of normal communication. Increasing the amount of meaning relevant artifacts or increasing the velocity of communication events makes things even more worse. There are objective limits for human processing, which can run into negative complexity.

Future is not Waiting

The term ‘future‘ is cognitively empty: there exists nowhere an object which can  be called ‘future’. What we have is some local actual presence (the Now), which the body is turning into internal representations of some kind (becoming the Past), but something like a future does not exist, nowhere. Our knowledge about the future is radically zero.

Nevertheless, because our bodies are part of a physical world (planet, solar system, …) and our entangled scientific work has identified some regularities of this physical world which can be bused for some predictions what could happen with some probability as assumed states where our clocks are showing a different time stamp. But because there are many processes running in parallel, composed of billions of parameters which can be tuned in many directions, a really good forecast is not simple and depends from so many presuppositions.

Since the appearance of homo sapiens some hundred thousands years ago in Africa the homo sapiens became a game changer which makes all computations nearly impossible. Not in the beginning of the appearance of the homo sapiens, but in the course of time homo sapiens enlarged its number, improved its skills in more and more areas, and meanwhile we know, that homo sapiens indeed has started to crash more and more  the conditions of its own life. And principally thinking points out, that homo sapiens could even crash more than only planet earth. Every exemplar of a homo sapiens has a built-in freedom which allows every time to decide to behave in a different way (although in everyday life we are mostly following some protocols). And this built-in freedom is guided by actual knowledge, by emotions, and by available resources. The same child can become a great musician, a great mathematician, a philosopher, a great political leader, an engineer, … but giving the child no resources, depriving it from important social contexts,  giving it the wrong knowledge, it can not manifest its freedom in full richness. As human population we need the best out of all children.

Because  the processing of the planet, the solar system etc.  is going on, we are in need of good forecasts of possible futures, beyond our classical concepts of sharing knowledge. This is where our vision enters.

VISION: DEVELOPING TOGETHER POSSIBLE FUTURES

To find possible and reliable shapes of possible futures we have to exploit all experiences, all knowledge, all ideas, all kinds of creativity by using maximal diversity. Because present knowledge can be false — as history tells us –, we should not rule out all those ideas, which seem to be too crazy at a first glance. Real innovations are always different to what we are used to at that time. Thus the following text is a first rough outline of the vision:

  1. Find a format
  2. which allows any kinds of people
  3. for any kind of given problem
  4. with at least one vision of a possible improvement
  5. together
  6. to search and to find a path leading from the given problem (Now) to the envisioned improved state (future).
  7. For all needed communication any kind of  everyday language should be enough.
  8. As needed this everyday language should be extendable with special expressions.
  9. These considerations about possible paths into the wanted envisioned future state should continuously be supported  by appropriate automatic simulations of such a path.
  10. These simulations should include automatic evaluations based on the given envisioned state.
  11. As far as possible adaptive algorithms should be available to support the search, finding and identification of the best cases (referenced by the visions)  within human planning.

REFERENCES or COMMENTS

[1] One of the most common entangled state in daily life is the usage of normal language! A normal language L works only because the rules of usage of this language L are shared by all speaker-hearer of this language, and these rules are explicit cognitive structures (not necessarily conscious, mostly unconscious!).

Continuation

Yes, it will happen 🙂 Here.