Practical Ethics with Reid Blackman

Reid Blackman confronts whack-a-mole approaches to AI ethics, ethical ‘do goodery,’ squishy values, moral nuance, advocacy vs. activism and overfitting for AI.

Reid distinguishes AI for ‘not bad’ from AI ‘for good’ and corporate social responsibility. He describes how the language of risk creates a bridge between ethics and business. Debunking the notion of ethicists as moral priests, Reid provides practical steps for making ethics palatable and effective.

Reid and Kimberly discuss developing organizational muscle to reckon with moral nuance. Reid emphasizes that disagreement and uncertainty aren’t unique to ethics. Nor do squishy value statements make ethics squishy. Reid identifies a cocktail of motivations driving organization to engage, or not, in AI ethics. We also discuss the tendency for self-regulation to cede to market forces and the government’s role in ensuring access to basic human goods. Cautioning against overfitting an ethics program to AI alone, Reid illustrates the benefits of distinguishing digital ethics from ethics writ large. Last but not least, Reid considers how organizations may stitch together responses to the evolving regulatory patchwork.

Reid Blackman is the author of “Ethical Machines” and the CEO of Virtue Consultants.

A transcript of this episode is here.