In my opinion, the problem is much bigger than just a class of algorithms (AI) and is largely a side-effect of late-capitalism. The primary issue is that softw

In my opinion, the problem is much bigger than just a class of algorithms (AI) and is largely a side-effect of late-capitalism. The primary issue is that software systems are inherently rule-driven (algorithmic) and that encoded rules are just that--encoded, fixed--for some amount of time during a release cycle, a system will operate in a fixed way. Private companies are the ones designing and developing these systems, and as far as private companies are concerned the only value they care about is profit. Ethics hardly enters into discussion when it comes to the extraction of the maximum capital possible. As long as there's no pre-established juridical ruling against it, the capitalist is not going to eliminate any approach for ethical reasons. Worse, because the algorithm is the product, these rules are carefully guarded and as the product grows in popularity it is not only the experience, but the algorithmic mode of reasoning itself that begins to dominate--people are complacent about, e.g. horrendous privacy practices because an ethics of digital privacy was never a question to begin with and as soon as companies rolled out products built on this absence it became normalized. Algorithms in themselves do not make values wither. A society in which anything other than monetary value was already never given consideration establishes an environment in which values wither, whether or not that erosion is realized by digital or mechanical means. It all comes back to capital baby. In other words, algorithms are one means of realizing the obfuscation an a-ethical modus operandi the grand abstraction of near unbridled capital already permits.