Author: Cennydd Bowles
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Could machines help us be more ethical?
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Even as a professional ethicist, I’ll admit it’s not easy to live an ethical life. Heck, it’s a slog at times. Choosing to living well means thinking critically about choices that most people make automatically. Sometimes it means committing to courses of action we don’t enjoy, drawing solace from the knowledge that the greater good…
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Teaching machines right from wrong
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The trouble with computers: you get exactly what you ask for. Ask a robot waiter to serve table eight’s food immediately and it might just throw it. An AI that’s trying to earn you money might decide the best way is to sell your house. It’s not enough to tell machines what to do; you…
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Should we be polite to chatbots?
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Suddenly they’re everywhere, destroying the idea of homework as we know it and worrying writers across the globe. Few technologies have captured public imagination quite like the modern chatbot: it took ChatGPT just two months to reach 100 million users, a feat that took Instagram two years. Understandably, tech firms now are racing to launch…
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Artificial intelligence: who owns the future?
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How did you go bankrupt?Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises The late Gordon Moore famously observed that computing power doubles every two years. For a long time you’d be forgiven for barely noticing. Our devices got faster and smaller, sure, but ultimately they were still computers doing computer things, just more…
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Hope In the Anthropocene
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There’s no such thing as the future. Instead, the roads before us stretch in a near-infinity of potential directions. We get to choose the route; in the words of famed cyberethicist Sarah Connor, there’s no fate but what we make. Of course, some of the futures we could choose are better than others. Perhaps we…
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Ethics Should Not Be A Luxury
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This is a guest post by Cennydd Bowles, a London-based designer and futurist focusing on the ethics of emerging technology. His second book, Future Ethics, was published in 2018. On first glance, living as an ethical consumer looks to be getting easier. The market for more virtuous, sustainable products is growing deeper and sprouting into…
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Future Ethics with Cennydd Bowles at SustainableUX
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This is a transcription of Cennyd Bowles’s talk from SustainableUX 2019 – offered with kind permission. Cennyd is a London based digital product designer with 16 years of experience advising clients, including Twitter, Ford, Cisco, and the BBC. His focus today is in the ethics of emerging technology. He’s lectured on the topic at Facebook,…
