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Is code truly amoral? Technology is not morally neutral. It embodies a set of values, a framework and an ideology. For instance, Google search engines have intr
by jonnykim98 8y ago
Is code truly amoral? Technology is not morally neutral. It embodies a set of values, a framework and an ideology. For instance, Google search engines have intrinsic properties that make them inherently and irredeemably flawed, because they attempt to infer intellectual properties, such as the meaningful content of a web site, from physical properties. Search engines rely primarily on query term location and query term frequency, sometimes boosted by other computable factors, such as link popularity. These pseudo-intellectual technologies such as search engines and metasearchers, are not morally neutral they fundamentally alter exosomatic conditions of our being as sensemaking entities. We now have new intellectual technologies coming to ascendancy: information architecture, knowledge management and intelligent infrastructure. Now is the time to raise questions about their non neutrality instead of abdicating such responsibility - for if anyone has agency it's the firm that designs these algorithms.
- golemotron 8y agoIs a hammer amoral? You can bonk someone on the head with it or build a house. So the answer is yes.
- jancsika 8y agoYou can't convincingly ransom a hospital on the other side of the Earth by swinging a hammer in your basement. You can't remotely exploit life-critical systems by studying which hammers were used to assemble them. You can't send streams of hammers through web browsers and persuade the user to mint coins in their spare time. You can't hammer a nail in a copper wire outside your beach house and catch a printer on fire in the midwest. I have no opinion on the question about the morality of code. But no answer to that question has anything to do with a hammer.