An ANT Perspective on Algorithmic Ethics

The next ICA 2018 session is on algorithmic culture and starts with Stina Bengtsson, whose focus is on the ethics of algorithmic culture. Apple’s AI assistant Siri is an example for this: it has been made to swear and say inappropriate things, and there are real questions about the ethics of subverting algorithmic culture in this way.

This can be understood through the lens of actor-network theory, which suggests that non-human actors have their own ethics as well: it proposes that technologies are not simply free for humans to use as they see fit; that technologies are not simply tools that can be used to perform tasks more easily than could otherwise be done; and that humans and technologies are fundamentally interconnected and cannot simply be separated.

This fundamentally challenges the idea of technologies as created by humans and as neutral entities that might be used in any which way. It also means that technologies are not necessarily subordinate to humans – rather, both parties are co-constitutive of reality in interrelation to each other.

Technologies are not simply means to an end, to be used by humans, then, and as a result morality is not simply an end in itself, either. Rather, it exists as a mode of existence that engenders different forms of humanity. By extension, mastery is also a chimera, and not simply a human trait.

If technologies therefore partially organise how we act, think, and do, there is the potential for a disclosive ethics that enables us to understand how our lives are entwined with technologies. Closure is the process of narrowing down choices to one preferred approach, and disclosive ethics explores how this process unfolds; this is descriptive and analytical and takes technology seriously from an ethical perspective, but is also largely retrospective – it cannot be used to actually change the world. It is also likely to be a scholarly rather than lay form of ethics.

But this may not necessarily be entirely true. The ANT perspective is able to examine power structures; it fundamentally represents a sociological rather than ethical perspective. From this perspective, morality also relates to action, and an ethics of the ordinary is based on judgment rather than rationality. Our ethical consciousness should embrace more than the human; ethics exists in communication.