Can technology and ethics co-exist?

Asoke K Laha, President & MD, Interra Information Technologies

I am a little bewildered about the pace at which technology is changing. The accumulated knowledge of the great change is still continuing over millennia as if change begets change, a chain process that envelops the whole universe. 

A few days ago, I read about something called brain net, which told me that the weird thoughts that had occurred to the writer may come true if scientific breakthroughs predicted come true. 
Let me treat Brain Net a little elaborately to make the uninitiated readers aware of this concept, which I believe can transform our social behavior and how we communicate with people.  It is complex and abstract and beyond the comprehension of the ordinary mind. Let me try to put it in simple language. It is a way to communicate brain to brain between people through the internet.  Presently, experiments have proved that the technique can be used for communicating with three people; two senders and one receiver for solving complex tasksusing direct brain-to-brain communication. Two of the three subjects are designated as “Senders” whose brain signals are decoded using real-time EEG data analysis. The decoding process extracts each Sender’s decision transmitted via the Internet to the brain of a third subject, the “Receiver,” who cannot see the game screen. The senders' decisions are delivered to the Receiver’s brain via magnetic waves. 

Without getting into the complex process that is involved, let me come to a few applications of this technology. First, this can be tried with a large number of people in large communities so that decisions are taken collectively and consciously. Scientists mention that this will have a lot of applications. The foremost can be for blind people, who would be able to be guided by others through EEG data so that they will be able to accomplish and act like ordinary people. 

I agree that this can be a breakthrough in the scientific world. On the ethical and positive side, such technologies and techniques can empower people. Does it have a flip side? I feel so. If the Brain net is used to influence people’s thinking, tastes, and preferences, we are entering an area that has to be carefully watched and studied.  I always take the analogy of nuclear power to demonstrate how one technology can have good and bad effects. Nuclear fusion can be used for generating clean energy. It has considerable uses in medical science and so many other avenues. But how can we wish away the destruction it has caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? That is the sinister side of technology, which we should take warning from. 
These realizations are slowly dawning on the people’s minds in one way or the other. Let us take the case of fossil fuels. That was also like the digital revolution. The advent of hydrocarbons brought about tectonic shifts in all spheres of life, such as how people traveled, how people made use of its multiple uses, how that commodity was traded globally overtaking the trade of all commodities etc.

Climate change, the most dreaded phenomenon of today, is because of the overuse of fossil fuels including coal, which has become handy for those countries who do not have the benefit of accessing coal. Climatic changes that take a toll on several people on the planet in the form of floods or droughts are on account of climate change created by high carbon emissions. Globally trillions are invested to avert climate change and to use clean energy. There is also another factor that is unique to climate change. Countries that contribute less to climate change have to bear more burden on account of climate change. 

Overuse of a technology or a concept can lead to later problems. That is true for almost all sectors. Does it happen to the digital world also, which many believed, its use is infinite? That idea is changing, at least in the minds of a few people, who are influential and called thought leaders.  Very recently, I read an article titled “ Should the world Press pause on AI” written by Jaspreet Bindra, a tech pursuing his Masters in AI and Ethics at Cambridge University. He refers to GPT4 and generative AI and the recent discourse among the experts on whether there should be a pause on further research and applications involving AI. 

Let me explain what GPT 4 is and its applications. It stands for  Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 4. GPTs are machine learning algorithms that respond to input with human-like text. It has many applications including creative writing. The company which developed the GPT4 is Open AI. The algorithm can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy. It can generate, create and iterate things without human intervention;  tasks that are very difficult and complex. For instance, the AI device can write a poem using ascending orders of the English alphabet. That is only one example, there are many complex problems the software can find solutions to in record time. 

Then what is the controversy all about?   The backdrop is interesting and more than that intriguing. It is mostly on account of the new dimension that experts are attributing to AI:  that is AI and ethics. The Future of Life Institute, under its name tech titans like Elon Musk, Stuart Russel,  etc signed the letter to humanity at large and particularly to the governments arguing that there should be a pause, at least six months for further research and experiments on AI. They argue that it is important to establish the positive impact of the research before a product is developed. Why it is a new development? Because such conundrums were not raised earlier. The after-effects of scientific research should be discerned before the product or solutions are developed. If that were the criteria, I do not know whether nuclear energy would have been developed, or human cloning would have been resorted to, chemical or biological weapons have been discovered or genetically modified seeds have been developed. Let us ask the basic question: how do we know AI, IoT, cloud, Facebook, Google, etc would have come into being if such a pause was imposed?  

That takes me to dwell on the dual use of technology.  One technology can be put to a number of uses. Google search engine can unravel a number of things to a student, which the classrooms cannot teach, be it data, or knowledge on a variety of subjects including geography. The Internet can connect people who are thousands of miles away. It can help two professionals work together separated by a continent and contribute to the well-being of each other.  It can broaden the vision of an individual, community, or society, which would have remained unknown to each other. These are the positive spins of technology.

Now, let us look at the negative side. How many parents are trying to protect their teenage boys and girls from surfing websites that they should not be exposed to at a young age? How many are using digital platforms to dupe people or for criminal purposes? Tech-savvy terrorist groups pose great problems to security agencies. Can digital frauds take place if the internet was not there? 

Can technological breakthroughs be stopped till the end-use is established and that too its positive impact? If such dictum prevailed ever since humanity existed, could there be any invention or discovery? Can such pause be imposed across the board and geographies? Will China follow that pose, if the US and the West come around to have that pause? Will Amazon follow that pause if Facebook imposes a pause? These are some of the high points that are being discussed and debated. I do not know whether there will be a consensus on this issue since there can be as many opinions as many experts who assemble to take a lead towards that. 

But the good sign is that tech giants are slowly getting to think in that direction; keeping ethics as the centre stage of a discovery or an innovation. That is a new thought process, however Utopian the concept may be.