Why We Need Philosophers in the Server Room
I studied philosophy at university and loved it, especially the ethics papers. One challenge that I had to grapple with afterwards was how to make practical use of any of this in my work.
Much later, when I built Loft Digital, I realised this grounding was framing many things that we did - in particular, the culture I wanted to bring to the business, the impact I wanted us to have, and the role I wanted us to play in our ecosystem.
A Missing Voice
If you remember, around 2018, the tech world hit a crisis point. The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. GDPR came into force. There was huge concern around data, how it was being used, and the balance of rights between tech users and providers.
At the time, I felt strongly that these were questions our nation’s philosophers should have an important voice on. We have a world-class tradition in ethical thinking in the UK - Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, John Stuart Mill - yet, our modern philosophers were missing from the news.
I raised the idea with lots of people. Unlike in France, where public philosophers seem to be celebrated and consulted on such things, the reaction I got was more like polite bemusement. Interesting, eccentric, definitely not practical.
Zoom Ahead…
I think it is fair to say that today, almost 10 years later, these issues have not been resolved, despite GDPR and masses of other regulation. If anything they are worse.
Plus, today we are grappling with questions far more complex than data privacy. We are deciding what sort of world we want to live in when AI is prevalent - which it will be. In fact, already is.
It’s gratifying to see a slow re-emergence of philosophy as a pragmatic discipline, in our tech world. We’re seeing AI Ethics Officers in major tech firms. We’re seeing the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford. We see it in the work of the Ada Lovelace Institute, ensuring data and AI work for people and society. We are seeing philosophical thinking flow down into practical things like Model Cards and Data Cards.
A Rallying Call
But it’s probably not enough, not yet. AI is progressing at incredible speed. The problems we need to figure out - agency, bias, consciousness, accountability - are very complex indeed. They don’t have obvious design or engineering answers.
We need much more input from the philosophy departments of the UK. We need ethicists as product owners, as engineers, as data scientists. We need philosophers on the news, explaining the big questions we need to be thinking about, right now. We need to open up those complex, nuanced, and often very difficult ideas, so everyone can engage with them.
To build a digital future that serves humanity, let’s have the experts who have spent 2,000 years studying what it means to be human, right there in the middle of it.