Ethics is Not a Patch
Most people believe that AI ethics is primarily about the behavior of AI systems. About manners. About showing kindness.
A chatbot says “please,” a robot dog doesn’t bite the intern, and suddenly… oh, miracle … we’ve created a moral machine ;-)
But ethics is not etiquette. It’s not about whether a synthetic voice can simulate empathy. It’s about what a machine does, why it does it, and who ultimately pays when it makes a mistake.
In a nutshell: not the show, but the consequences.
When ethics becomes theater, machines don’t grow morals, they grow markets. And in the silence between simulated empathy and real consequence, we trade justice for user experience.
In boardrooms and code sprints, ethics is often treated like a software patch. Something you slap on after launch like a warning label.
That doesn’t solve the problem. It monetizes the illusion of security.
The threat lies not in an evil that appears monstrous, but in an evil that appears bureaucratically well-organized. Sterilized. Automated.
If we reduce ethics to performance, we don’t get ethical machines. We get morally neutral weapons disguised as products.
And like all weapons, they end up in the hands of those least likely to read the instructions.
This might be of interest:
You can read an excerpt from the book “Critical Thinking is Your Superpower” here:
