Ethic - Short bites. Episode #6. Jonathan Cook

I think, Virginie Glaenzer, this word trust that you just mentioned is really key because actually it undermines, I'm sorry to say, the entire premise of this discussion we're having, which is getting to business leadership, because I don't think that leaders can alone set ethics. Especially in this circumstance that John was just talking about, which is that we don't agree. We have disagreeing factions, disagreeing interests. I am, John, more pessimistic, unfortunately, because there are a lot of terrible examples of what's going on. But we do have pieces of social glue. And education, what you were just talking about, Virginie, is one of them. And unfortunately, This is a great surprise given what we expected from the internet in the 1990s. Journalism was one of those traditional glues, having reliable information. If you don't have reliable shared information that you really can count on, then you can't have people making agreements about what is ethical because we don't even agree on the the factual premises upon which these ethical arguments are being made. And, you know, from Boston, Katherine, I have to bring up the instance from this last year of the MIT Media Lab, I think it was, the personal food computer. It was this amazing thing. It was AI matching up with food. And it was growing vegetables at amazing rates. And they would bring in journalists and they would, you know, wave their hands in the air and the NPR and the BBC and all of these, you know, really respected journalistic institutions said, wow, this is amazing. And they wrote these pieces about it. And it was an entire hoax. There was no AI. They were taking tomato plants that were grown in soil traditionally in conventional ways, and then they were brushing all the dirt off, putting them in the silicon substrate, and then putting them in grow boxes, which is all that these boxes were. They were boxes with lights in them. It was very traditional, pre-digital hydroponics. It was a complete fraud. But something went wrong with our journalism there, in that we didn't know the difference until an insider leaked it out, until you know, finally, after a long time, this was a total scam. This speaks to the kind of pressure we're under in business to create growth, and that warps our ethical judgments. But it also speaks to what the role of journalism is in relation to business, but specifically to AI, because unfortunately, for a long time, I think the role of journalism that reports on business has been to promote business, not to question business. And the same thing has been there for AI. You know, there were articles I was reading last year about a dog collar that purported to use artificial intelligence to describe the emotions of your dog. Well, look, I mean, if you're honest and you have a dog, you don't always understand your dog's emotions and you live with the thing all the time. I mean, it was a ridiculous idea. And yet, you know, we promote these ideas. I would love to see more critical questioning in ethics from our journalism. But what we also need journalists to do then is to help us communicate with each other, not to come out and say, you know, hey, we're the New York Times or the Washington Post and this is the way it is. We're issuing a report, but we need to have a new way for us to share ethical perspectives and to share them with business leaders. Because I think that an ethical business leader is somebody who listens to the perspectives of others and doesn't just follow their own ethical imperatives. What's good for them? That's got to be the best kind of thing. So the leader doesn't create the ethics. But helps us as a community, a worldwide community, to make ethical decisions when there's ambiguity involved. You know, what's best for the highest number of people? And maybe artificial intelligence could help with that. I would love to see it.