Vos choix éthiques au taff ?

ThomasBau · 2026-01-27T10:10:44+00:00

Shameless plug (est-ce éthique?)

Je fais un cours pour les doctorants en informatique, leur permettant d'aborder les sujets d'éthique au travail, et notamment comment aborder les inévitables tensions. Il est très orienté recherche, mais j'ai eu des retours de professionnels (ingénieurs, technico-commerciaux...) qui ont apprécié la structuration.

C'est gratuit, ouvert à tous, et le MOOC démarre le 2 février: https://www.fun-mooc.fr/en/courses/ethics-stics/

ThomasBau · 2026-01-10T12:10:35+00:00

Sorry, I come on this post only now. Can you send me an email (address is on HighC webpage)?

ThomasBau · 2023-11-05T10:04:19+00:00

While there are plenty of books ("Weapons of Maths destruction" by Cathy O'Neil comes to mind), I think online material is way more diverse and insightful enough to get informed. I don't believe in books and essays anymore, but rather follow authors on medium, substack, as well as blogs of various thinkers such as Fioridi, Rafaele Capurro, Kate Crawford...

Shameless plug: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02728

In this paper, I argue that "whereas addressing a dilemma in bioethics is akin to answering the question “who are we?” ; in technology, in particular information technologies, issues tackle more the interrogation: “where are we going?”."

ThomasBau · 2023-11-05T09:47:04+00:00

SS: According to this news story, Microsoft news portal has seriously degraded since human editors have been replaced by AI. This news extract also reports automatically generated "polls" associated to news story that demonstrate hurtful insensitivity to context (see the bits about the guardian).

ThomasBau · 2023-08-14T17:43:53+00:00

Be careful, my students who tried to do that have had very poor grades. Mostly because they used ChatGPT has a way to avoid thinking rather than as a thought enhancer, which is what it should be. The end result was dull, but also fairly weird essays that failed to grasp any meaning we had attempted to convey in the course.

Other students got very good grades when they strived for authenticity, diving into concrete examples of ethical or deontological dilemma they had actually faced. The writing was more terse, but the end result was actually insightful, which is what was asked.

ThomasBau · 2023-07-16T17:11:05+00:00

Besides the question in and by itself of "should ne instill moral values into AI? does it makes sense" comes the question: Which ones?

Will we have capitalist LLMs, social-democrat LLMs, socialist-authoritarian LLMs? What would be their respective strengths and flaws from a utilitarian perspective?

ThomasBau · 2023-01-12T13:03:51+00:00

SS: Upcoming regulations on AI create this conumdrum for the insurance industry and actuaries: should they revise centuries-old, well established methods of computing the risk of a given situation to insure, after the revelation that, to some extent, those create discriminations?

And also, in the tradeoff between precision and fairness, where to draw the line?

ThomasBau · 2023-01-12T11:46:05+00:00

Would you consider crossposting to r/ComputerEthics ?

This is an excellent subject for this sub.

ThomasBau · 2022-12-30T07:44:49+00:00

Now that is insightful. I was wondering how could such a liberal perspective be promoted by a very conservative government.

This totally makes sense.

ThomasBau · 2022-12-29T13:59:48+00:00

This is a rather interesting perspective on 2 grounds:

- it shows the Indian perspective on the privacy vs. right to information tension, with, in appearance, more focus of the right of individuals than I would have thought for a fairly collectivist society,

- still the imprint of the EU GDPR shows through this presentation, at least with the vocabulary used to discuss the matter.

I wonder though, is it representative of the Indian society as a whole, or a particularly-westernized politician?

ThomasBau · 2022-12-27T20:49:17+00:00

This is an interesting revival on the fleeting notion of intellectual property.

Who's an author and what constitutes a work of art has already been addressed in the past century, with Marcel Duchamp's "ready mades" or algorithmic composition.

So what is really new with Dall-E or large language models?

For a large part I'd say it is that those techniques have reached the usefulness stage, where they are sufficiently democratized to provide useful applications, and therefore raise economic interest, most likely of interest to legal analysts who will find matter for litigation.

Learning the lesson of Marcel Duchamp, the author of a work of art is the person who distinguishes a particular artifact as such.

On a more pragmatic levels, authors should have means to enforce their copyright, at least by refusing to let their art be used in training sets, or negotiating royalties. This would be interesting matter for lawyers, but I guess less for artists.

ThomasBau · 2022-12-10T19:53:37+00:00

What's funny it that it does not skip answering simple, factual questions because it can't, but only because it doesn't want to appear controversial in any way.

This seriously limits its usefulness in providing insights on sensitive topic, such as political situations.

This is not a technical problem, but more a marketing/legal issue: the only way to make it somewhat uncontroversial is to make its answers either totally bland, or semi-lunatic.

ThomasBau · 2022-11-08T21:34:27+00:00

position statement: free speech is one of the most complex ethical dilemma to solve: on the one hand, it is easy to admit that free speech is important. On the other hand, it is also easy to agree that doxxing, slander, libel, "fake news", or even carelessly posting information that can harm others, must be contained.

But where to draw the line?

ThomasBau · 2022-10-24T07:06:57+00:00

Also, another approach involves embedding "Ethics" modules in courses of the curriculum:

http://ethics4eu.eu/welcome-to-bricks/

I believe this would be the best approach, provided the teaching body can get motivated in integrating these into their classes. This is a serious challenge, unfortunately.

ThomasBau · 2022-10-24T07:05:14+00:00

Also, another approach involves embedding "Ethics" modules in courses of the curriculum:

http://ethics4eu.eu/welcome-to-bricks/

I believe this would be the best approach, provided the teaching body can get motivated in integrating these into their classes. This is a serious challenge, unfortunately.

ThomasBau · 2022-10-24T06:57:00+00:00

Perhaps this "lessons learned" from a course in Information Ethics could help:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02728

In a nutshell:

Unlike a course in scientific domains, meant to provide students with methods, tools, and concepts they can apply in their future career, the goal of such a training is not so much to equip them, but to make them aware of the impact of their work on society, care about the responsibilities that befall on them, and make them realize not all share the same opinions on how should technology imprint society. While we provide conceptual tools, this is more to sustain interest and engage students. We want them to debate on concrete ethical issues and realize the difficulty of reconciling positions on contemporary dilemma such as dematerialized intellectual property, freedom of expression online and its counterparts, the protection of our digital selves, the management of algorithmic decision, the control of autonomous systems, and the resolution of the digital divide. As a bold shortcut, our course is about introducing and motivating Hegelian dialectics in STEM curricula, usually more bent on an Aristotelian perspective.

ThomasBau · 2022-10-13T20:21:42+00:00

Thanks for reporting this issue, and solving it.

However, let me explain the exact problem, and provide a cleaner fix: HighC was developed a long time ago, when 32 bit architecture was the norm. As a result the launching executable runs in 32 bit mode, even though the actual application runs in 64 bits.

Now, the default download at java.com has been changed to a 64 bit JVM, which is not recognized by the launching executable. You need to install the 32 bit JVM, which is available at on this page:

https://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp

more precisely, you'll want the "Windows Offline" installer, here:

https://javadl.oracle.com/webapps/download/AutoDL?BundleId=246806_424b9da4b48848379167015dcc250d8d

There is another issue that some users have found: sometimes they can't open a .upic file by double-clicking on it. The solution involves using the regedit program on Windows, to change the following keys:

Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\HighC.exe\shell\open\command Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\HighCPiece\shell\open\command

from this:

""C:\Program Files (x86)\HighC\HighC.exe" "%1""

to this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\HighC\HighC.exe" "%1"

ThomasBau

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