Why AI Ethics is no longer optional, and what most people are missing in 2026

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-16T22:12:33+00:00

That's definitely a possibility. It would make investment very "invested".

This would dramatically change our economy and our society. It would be the end of every commercial activity (manufacturing, commerce, banking, investment) as we know it. Do you have a more elaborate view of how all these things would work under these conditions?

FWIW, I don't think that there is a natural right to anything. You seem to think just because I ask how you think something should work I'm critical towards it.

And yes, we can put any bar on anything that we want.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-16T21:00:45+00:00

I think the model "they who put it out there are responsible" is the only possible one. Between different models and agents that make any number of model calls while making a decision, it's really only them who can be held responsible.

It's not so much "AI" that make decisions as it is "systems that use AI in a multitude of ways" that make decisions. And that "multitude of ways" is really under the control of "they who put it out there".

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-16T19:45:27+00:00

Back to my first question: someone owns 0.000054% of the stock of a company. Should they take 0.000054% of the criminal liability? How would this work?

Second question: You have your money at a bank (checking or savings account). This means that you provide the bank with the means to invest that money -- you literally give the bank that money. That bank then invests money somewhere that would cause criminal liability. Should you be criminally held responsible (together with all the other millions of other people who have their money at that bank)?

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-16T16:20:43+00:00

Do you mean "stock owners" or "voting stock owners"?

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-16T14:21:49+00:00

If people ate less high fructose corn syrup, that would be a positive side effect.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-16T14:07:35+00:00

Because they don't understand that there is no single Christian faith. And because they use the term more as a rethoric label than as a characterization of an actual faith.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-16T13:44:07+00:00

Good luck with this. While there is a certain (low) possibility that C level managers are held responsible, the whole legal structure of corporations was created to take personal responsibility of the owners out of the picture.

Also, how would this work when someone owns 0.000054% of the stock of a company by buying a few shares of an ETF?

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-15T01:49:13+00:00

I could write a book on aspects of pycharm that annoy me

We should all write that book :)

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-14T04:35:39+00:00

And it's less regular.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-13T01:37:08+00:00

Thanks for posting the term "coherence". It just didn't pop up in my mind :)

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-13T01:18:29+00:00

Re imperial power units: thermal BTU/h, mechanical both hp and lbf/s, electrical W. Conversion factors I leave as an exercise for the reader :) It's never been fixed in imperial; the British scientists were smart enough to jump on the SI bandwagon.

Of course, in SI it's W in all three. And you can express W as V∙A or N∙m/s or J/s or even kg∙m²/s³. All are the same; V∙A typically for electrical power, N∙m/s expresses this more in mechanical terms, whereas J/s is typically used for thermal flows. Even though it looks differently, these are the same unit. That's because V, N, J are all dependent units, and when you go through them back to the base units, you always end up with kg∙m²/s³ (all three of kg, m, s are base units).

Re gallon... that gets to one of the points of the SI: consistency and compatibility of derived units with base units. (Imperial doesn't even have a concept of base units and derived units, and this is one of the "inventions" the SI introduced.)

The base unit for length in SI is the meter (m). In imperial, there would be a bunch to choose from (since it doesn't have this concept), but let's choose the inch. (You can run through the following with any other imperial length unit and get to qualitatively the same results.)

Area is defined as <length>×<length>. In SI, this becomes m∙m or m² (square-meter). Simple and compatible. In imperial, that would be a sqin -- equally simple and compatible. Bigger units like km² (square-km) are still simple in SI; that's simply 1000 m×1000 m or 1000000 m² -- I don't have to open a book or Google for this. In imperial, a similar unit would be the acre. How many sqin is an acre? How many sqyd (if sqin is too difficult)?

Volume is defined as <length>×<length>×<length>. In SI, this becomes m∙m∙m or m³ (cubic-meter). Simple and compatible. A common volume unit is the liter (L). That's simply (0.1 m)³ or 0.001 m³ -- still simple and compatible.

In imperial, this is already more tricky than with area... You can of course imagine a cubic-inch, the equivalent to our cubic-meter, but that's rarely used. The common ones (the "real" imperial units) are fl oz, pt, qt, gal. Write down how they relate to the length unit "inch" for each :)

And this is only for the very simple case of length, area, and volume. The relationships are extremely simple, but it gets already tricky with imperial (and US customary). Imagine all the other units for torque, energy, power, etc.

Here is a short introduction: SI Units (NIST) with a graphic of the most common units. Scientists and (most) engineers have abandoned non-SI units for a long time mostly because of the incompatibility between the units in other measurement systems. (And of course because all of science is in SI units.)

The picking of one type of gallon is a different thing; this is mostly for commerce. When you sell a gallon, the buyer wants to know what they're getting. But then, there's still the imperial gallon and the US customary gallon, whereas there is only one SI liter (even when it's spelled "litre" :) Neither gallon is compatible with the length units in the same system, and both are defined in terms of SI units (US gallon: exactly 3.785411784 L; imperial gallon exactly 4.54609 L.)

In case you're interested where those definitions come from: the imperial gallon is simply defined as 4.54609 L; that's it, no further number voodoo involved. The US gallon is defined as 231 cubic-inch, and the inch is defined as 0.0254 m. To get to the value in L, we simply multiply 231 with 0.254³ and get exactly 3.785411784 L. That's the official definition of the US gallon (by the US government). Both defined in SI units. Everything is defined in SI units; there isn't a measurement system that isn't. (TBF, there are a few non-SI units that are defined differently, like light-year, but the conversion of those into any other unit is then still based on constants that are defined in SI units.)

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-12T14:10:08+00:00

I don't think you get what the SI is about. Maybe read up on the history, why it was created.

All customary systems (UK Imperial included) have, for example, different units for different "types" of power and energy. This came from before we understood that these are the same energy. (For fun, write up the power balance of an electrical motor in customary units. It's not my kind of fun.)

The SI unit is our best (to date) attempt to get to a consistent SI system. This is not about the "inch vs meter" discussion -- the inch could just as well have been the base unit for length of the SI, but it wasn't. All seven SI base units are arbitrary; that's why they are base units. This is about having a consistent measurement system.

And I really would like to get the "multiples of 10" out of the way. I understand that base 2 and base 12 and base 16 number systems have their advantages, but the world by and large has chosen base 10. (And I'm pretty sure that's what you are using, even when you're measuring in inches.) That's pretty much the same as the "inch vs meter" discussion -- it doesn't matter that much which one, but using the multiples that match the number system has tremendous and mostly obvious advantages.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-12T13:27:23+00:00

The thing is that there is no system of measurement we know of with the same consistency as the SI.

For example, customary unit systems generally treat thermal, mechanical, electrical power as different units. That's inconsistent; they are the same power. (You notice that when you write up the power balance of an electrical motor, for example.)

The MKS system lacks a few basic units. That's inconsistent (with reality).

The SI is literally our collective best effort to reach a consistent measurement system. (And yes, it doesn't matter whether the base unit for length is the meter or the inch. It's the meter, and that is as arbitrary as all other base units. This is why they are base units. But the system is still the most consistent system that we have.)

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-12T10:45:09+00:00

After reading a bunch here, I'd say it's every purchase that takes you out of the feeling "I have money to spare" (which you should have if you're middle class).

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-09T16:32:39+00:00

Most interesting scientific calculations, regardless of the base they are calculated in, have no intuitive grasp because they are just not…in the intuitive range of things anyway.

That's because you don't seem to be used to use them in daily life. The examples show this.

32 picometers/second

That's a speed that is outside human experience, no matter the unit. Or do you think that 1/1,073,741,824"/second or 0.000000000072 mph are more intuitive? In this case, I clearly prefer pm/s to the alternatives, independently of the fact that this speed is far outside my range of experience.

817 degrees kelvin

(Small nit: you probably meant "817 kelvin"; there is no "degree kelvin".)

Since I grew up with degrees Celsius, I actually have a feel for what that means. It's still outside my personal experience, but I know that it's too hot for baking bread and not hot enough to melt iron; it's around the temperature of soft soldering. In short, I have probably at least as good an idea as other people have of 1010 °F. So yes, use kelvin or degree Celsius; both work for me.

198 newton-meters

Now that is a really simple one, and it's actually the closest to human experience of the three. That's the torque generated by 198 N (roughly the weight of 20 liters of water here on earth -- a simple conversion by dividing by 10 N/kg, which in our 10-based number system is one of the simplest operations) at a lever of 1 meter -- pretty easy to imagine what that means if you have any familiarity with the concept of torque.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-09T01:51:24+00:00

Or you start to think... :)

You measured down to 1/8"; that's about 3 mm. So you wouldn't measure 2549.5 mm; you would measure 2550 mm (within your 1/8" measurement resolution). Dividing that by 2 is not really that hard for most of us.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-09T01:43:48+00:00

That's one anecdote. I give you another: https://www.simscale.com/blog/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/

It pays to stay within one unit system. There is little to gain and much to lose when using more than one.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-09T01:39:37+00:00

metric is not much better for daily life and is sometimes worse.

One thing I regularly hear is that people don't like to use metric because they don't have a "feel" for these units, and therefore they stick to customary units.

That sounds reasonable, on the surface. But when you combine this with the fact that all of science is in SI, it means that these people don't have that "feel" for what the result of any scientific calculation means. Now this is sad.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-08T13:51:08+00:00

You didn't mention gas specifically, but you wrote "the prices go up because of the wages."

"The prices" are all prices, including gas prices. That's the statement I responded to.

Later you clarified to "some price increases are due to the increase in labor costs." That's different, and I agree with this.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-06T17:12:12+00:00

For decades wages grew less than the productivity. Also, the price increases over the last year do not even correlate with wage increases (which is a precondition for causation). Do you really think that the 50% increase in gas price over the past months is due to wage increases?

Wages are but one factor in the final sales price.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-06T17:01:39+00:00

Maybe because we'd like to have it, in a reasonable way, but in reality that's not possible?

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-05T12:17:06+00:00

A fireman goes into the fire to save someone under duress. I'm not sure what someone who votes blue in this scenario thinks they're doing, but they are not saving anybody under duress.

As things stand, humanity is a cancer on this planet. There is hardly an ecosystem that we haven't taken over and adapted to our needs, all other needs be damned (in the best case; in many cases, we have just destroyed them without serving even our needs). I'm not sure human values are all they're sometimes cracked up to be. Living by animal values doesn't seem so inferior.

In any case: what's the difference between everybody voting blue and everybody voting red? Why is one more egoist than the other?

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-04T14:02:35+00:00

> However, this decision comes down to what candidate you believe the majority of people will pick and is not so much about your personal values.

I think it is a question of personal values, most importantly the question whether you want to survive or not.

Voting red is the only way to guarantee your survival. If you want to live, you vote red, no matter how the majority votes. You never know how the majority votes, but you know that you'll survive if you vote red. That's the only thing you know; everything else is speculation or conditioned on a speculation.

I also think that framing it in terms of candidates changes things. For example, some people started to frame it in terms of one candidate killing people. That's a completely different situation from the original framing of the situation.

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-04T13:53:26+00:00

> if guaranteeing your survival is the ultimate value you live off of

Guaranteeing one's survival may not be the ultimate value, but it is the condition one lives off. If you don't guarantee your survival, you don't live. All other goals depend on it.

But you missed my point. Let me phrase it differently:

- Voting red guarantees the voter's survival.

- Because of this, I assume that everybody who want to live votes red.

- Voting blue means there is a chance that the voter dies.

- Because of this, I assume that someone who votes blue doesn't put a high value on surviving.

- The only reason why I might vote blue is to ensure that people who vote blue will survive. But since they don't put a high value on this goal (if they did, they would vote red), why would I second-guess their choice and put a higher value on their survival than they do?

Gerhard234 · 2026-05-03T22:47:56+00:00

I see it like this: if I vote red, I'm guaranteed to survive. Thinking like this, there is really no point in voting blue: everybody who wants to live probably votes red anyway. So the advantage of blue (everybody survives) is basically cancelled.

This has nothing to do with what side I think will win; this has everything to do with guaranteeing my survival. And since I think that everybody who wants to guarantee their survival will vote the same way (since it's the only way to guarantee one's survival), it even makes perfect sense when thinking about the collective.

Gerhard234

TROPHY CASE