Rhys Lindmark ~ Digital Ethics Panel

foreign [Music] okay so our second last panel for the afternoon we're going to talk about digital ethics and how it's going to shape with blockchains and digital organizations in mind so without further ado please welcome recently mark from the mit media lab dci um shiv from streamer we have zuko from zcash foundation we have shira from maiden and bill from mines yeah that's you uh you can beautiful hello okay hello people over here nice kiss hello people over there uh hope everybody's doing well so we're here to talk about digital ethics uh which we're all very passionate about and which i think a lot of people in the audience are passionate about and so let's just get things started off first and say who you are your name uh and then also like why you're passionate about digital ethics but like a very quick kind of 30 second snip so i'm rhys and i'm passionate about digital ethics because i think the intersection of technology in like society is very fascinating and very important so that's me um i'm shiv malek from streamr i used to be an investigative journalist for the guardian and i kind of fell into this rabbit hole about a year and a half ago mainly because i was interested in digital cooperatives so that's what brings me into the digital ethical space as well hello i'm shira and i'm the co-founder of maiden we work on global user research i came from the political world and i think personally i've been really passionate about ethics from them very early on partly because i've seen how wrong it can go and i think the example of israel in my lifetime and you know my grandparents escaping nazi germany founding a country suddenly becoming occupiers that kind of thing is what led me to say oh crap with all this power in technology where might it lead my name is bill ottman i'm the co-founder of minds and i just got obsessed with free and open source software and privacy and how those sort of coil together and are like a paradox but sort of both necessary so yeah and how open source enables global collaboration my name is zuko and i'm one of the founders of zcash and i got into digital ethics because my idea of ethics is more outcome oriented or consequence oriented rather than like principle oriented and the digital technology is having more and more of the biggest consequences on our whole society nowadays yeah great so just to reflect back some of that zuko's talking about a big difference from an ethical perspective of consequentialism or utilitarianism which is like the outcome focus versus something like deontology or virtue ethics which is more kind of means focused um and then i also want to reflect shiv was talking about the platform like cooperatives and earlier on the future of work panel uh nathan schneider's one of the like starters of platform cooperatives shira's talking about i think that yours is interesting piece with like the the kind of more macro take on like global governance and how the people who once had less power than get more power and then bill's talking about the for me a thing that we're going to talk about a bit which is privacy transparency um and you should think about these things as like a tension a balance a co-evolution um how they how they relate to each other so just a little reflection there i think before we talk about like technology though let's talk about ethics so how do you all think about ethics totally removed from technology i think about it in terms of freedom of information and sort of mutual respect of the applications that you're in well in terms of digital ethics the applications that you're interacting with if they're not whoa whoa whoa whoa not allowed ethics ethics ethics what do you think i'll take that sorry sorry um just give you a moment he was saying he didn't want to hear about the technology yet he wanted to talk about the ethics without the technology that's why you got buzzed that's right you got punished it's true i understand sorry sorry bill all right i'll just take a quick stab i think ethics is deeply relational and i think ethics is about kind of the study and practice of how to not cause harm um i'd second that uh how i think what's informed me is kind of and this is almost from being a journalist like you look and view the world and try and figure out what problems there are uh and then you know all these things are usually in balance so you know you have uh libertarianism as a set of ideals of which freedom of speech and transparency uh are paramount uh then you have i i would situate myself more on the left side of the political spectrum where you know uh conversations around equality and legality uh are what's important uh and you know again just looking at the world trying to figure out what problems there are and then trying to figure out you know again what how ethically you could create different structures uh is how i go about it any other bonus thoughts the way i think about ethics is respecting other people's choices like their freedom to choose in a way that you might not and taking responsibility for your own choices and then how or gosher oh i'm just curious by responsibility which is a word i love but i feel like we don't talk about a lot in this space and what does that mean responsibility for your own choices based on their actions as related to you or the system or others yeah i deliberately didn't try to explain that because i'm not sure how to how to qualify that but it feels really core right you like taking responsibility for your actions is really core except i don't really know how to measure it key question i would say for this panel and our community yeah and let me push back on or explore further another part of your answer there zuka which is the letting others uh kind of do them the kind of do you mindset um how do you think about what happens when you let other people do them and then it has externalities on you or it impacts you how do you think about that side of things it's sort of like the non-aggression principle comes into things and um you know ethics is very subjective so you know what's ethical to one person one side of the spectrum is the opposite to the other so ultimately freedom but at the same time not overstepping yeah i mean you can see maybe bringing it almost back to the technological uh side of things you can see that uh i don't know i think i could see that uh ethical transformation within the ethereum community itself like you know i don't know maybe people disagree with this but like two two three years ago it was you know a quite high libertarian in its uh in its makeup in terms of people you know it's about privacy and that being incredibly core uh perhaps also transparency and like you know leave me alone right and i don't want uh anyone else telling me what to do and i don't think anyone would necessarily describe the ethereum space that way now like there's a whole load of other people with other sets of ethical like uh considerations and other perspectives and ideologies that have entered into this and has diluted the libertarian thing whereas you know bitcoin is still remain high libertarians right yeah i think yeah that makes sense so i think and and it's just worth asking this for yourselves as the audience to say just totally remove from the technology that you're thinking about how do i think about ethics in general and then now start to apply it to like the digital ethics in this digital world that we live in so and i guess bill i want to ask you specifically at the start we were thinking about how open source software um relates to ethics and and i think bill makes the relatively uh you know strong claim that says hey open source software might be either necessary for this or perhaps the incentive models might be necessary for this so tell us how you think about ethics and this overlap with open source software it's also i mean there's open source in the sense of software but also information in general so it sort of transcends physical and digital but um and then there's also distinction between free software and open source software which you know if stallman were up here he would be freaking out because we're conflating the two and free software being you know sort of the hyper ethical to him open source being apolitical so you know but one is more free depending on your definition the problem with in a sense the the free a bit of foss right free open source is that it's it hasn't it sort of been a failure right i mean this is why we're in a sense isn't that why you know 2017 happened and our and utility tokens have happened they're like oh finally we can create incentives for people to do this because it turns out free isn't good enough like just relying on altruism like won't get you that far because people give up they're like oh yeah i don't want to do this anymore because i'm i'm not getting paid like i have to make my way in the world right yeah i just want to relate this back to your earlier question because i think the idea that ethics is somehow an absolute truth which i think i don't think any of us believe i didn't hear that um but yet when we have these values we deeply hold like free or open or transparent or privacy all of a sudden like we just think well it's open so it must be great the truth is open isn't neutral right there's a whole world of power dynamics outside of crypto that are existing and we don't negate them just by being open so i think i think it's this is a really hard tension for anyone but certainly those of us in this space who are really deep idealists and hold these profound values i don't i don't think open is neutral and i think we have to really really grapple with that in a sense just uh maybe this is a question for the rest of the panel and i'm now doing your bit sorry that's it i feel awkward now he's a gentleman you can ask and then rhys can be one of the answerers we've deconstructed the panel um which is look for me the ethical consideration in being open is that people the code is transparent right it's like okay look you know and like post snowden and i was in the guardian at the time that snowden broke it's like fascinating right people it was so strange because people are like you know the day before if you'd told someone look actually all these government agencies are entirely spying on you and this is what they do they were literally like wrapped you in foil and like called you a nutter you're like get out you crazy person the day after that i was that guy right right the day after though everyone was like yeah sure of course the government does that like we knew that all along would you it's like hang on where was the bit in the middle where we like get out on the streets protest or like nothing none of that happened it was so strange um but to come back to the the open part it's like okay here's a way of like being transparent right but what more is there to that right it's like i mean that that would be my question what more do you find in the transparency of code and saying look there aren't any backdoors in this you can check it yourself yeah what's the question what more is there in being open source from an ethical perspective except to say where the the what we do is transparent so it helps prevent back doors which i think are unethical and it additionally empowers people to get more choice if you don't have open if your software isn't open then people only get the binary choice of do they like like delete facebook or are they stuck with whatever it is that facebook does whereas if you instead had an open platform they would get a lot more fine-grained decisions about what they will and won't engage in yeah i think you can imagine this from the voice and exit framework where you say um if you're ever in a system and you don't like that system you can either express voice within that system and say i don't like this anymore or you can exit that system i think what zuko is saying is when something's totally transparent then it's you are allowed to express more voice within the system because you know more about the system itself and your exits don't just need to be like i'm just gonna leave facebook and never do it maybe you can fork the facebook code and create some new kind of community around yeah wouldn't that be great no it is great i'm not sure it's it's more of a um i guess it is an ethical consideration in a sense that you put the person first and their choices first you're elevating that above the arc right and you're making that an architecture you're building that in to the architecture i get that uh uh but i'm not sure i mean in a sense i don't think that's necessarily proven is like our high ethical choice but other people out there largely because we don't have that many open systems on a mass scale that end users or regular consumers like actually like you know if facebook was an open system would people actually leave given what they know now i still doubt it right that that's the interesting thing so like are we promising like two like are we putting that too high up the ethical consideration scale when actually there's other things to worry about it's just a step in the right direction so you know just because it's open like you're saying doesn't mean that it is good but that would be a positive movement is that enough though like i would say but i i think we do kind of get into a trap of feeling like that's enough because it's a really hard step to take in and of itself to create secure open transparent global systems right yeah it's like a full-time job like mega yeah really um so that's hard enough but i think this notion of choice and consequence which you brought up zuko and i agree it's really hard like to figure out how to measurably take responsibility for all the consequences of our actions both positive and negative that said that still may be the framework of ethics that we need to grapple with which is that there are multitude of choices they will all have consequences they will have consequences for me for others for the system which will then again have consequences for me and um and and we need to account for both the choices and the multitude of them that there are and the potential consequences and even beginning to talk about things in that way i think that would be the right first step in addition to the other steps we're taking ethical training for everybody um yeah i think so and just to reflect back some things a when you're thinking about impact doing good things is good but if you want to like maximize your impact you have to start thinking okay from a maximalist perspective what can i how can i maximize something here and there's like this weird consequentialist framework called effective altruism that's all about like maximizing impact i also want to talk about um on the open source side it's a very awkward i mean in the cryptocurrency community there was this project called grin one of their main developers um was just trying to raise some money to develop code and like no one was giving him the money and it was very sad and so this is to ship's point it's like man like and that's why these token models might be uh might unlock some of these new incentive systems that we're excited about and then finally an awkward piece of all of it which was bill was saying earlier is that when you have something like um code in bits those things can be distributed with zero marginal cost um which makes it awkward because you're like okay i want this mp3 why am i paying a bunch of money for it when it costs essentially zero dollars from a marginal perspective to get it and so when you get to zero in a bunch of economic equations it kind of makes things awkward um so be aware of that as well if you're asking for money from people who will only give you the money if you keep the code secret you you're talking to the wrong people you don't even want to be involved with those people i mean we know with just wordpress docker so many amazing open source projects that are making lots of money and they leverage ago agpl v3 to help do that yeah those all the the open source software licenses um so a question that i have here we've been talking a lot about i think in general we're talking about like the systems themselves as like how can we make good systems what about zero marginal cost how do we think about freeness and open sourceness i want to talk about like the human side as well and think about like how should we think about the people who are building these systems and whether we're thinking about identity whether think about diversity and inclusion whether we're thinking about the kinds of people that we're impacting in the power structures at play how are you all thinking about kind of the identity side here like who is building them and who it's impacting i think lane reddick got into some uh like trouble and i don't understand why for like wrangling in identity politics or what was viewed as identity politics but asking those kinds of questions um i think and i won't say the ethereum space or ethereums or the ethereum community is necessarily diverse but like the blockchain community in a wider sense i think actually is like you know silicon valley is incredibly from an identity perspective like homogeneous right could probably say that with like some authority uh uh on the other hand like uh the blockchain space it's you know you find it it's stuff popping up everywhere like there are genuine hubs in singapore in thailand uh all throughout europe all throughout north america like denver right um and latin america right so in that sense i think it is uh extensive but i think should we worry about those things yeah we should like and to say that we need to close that question down because it's a meritocracy like i think that that disturbs me a little i'll i'll tackle this um i guess i think about the human element in two ways one is around the inclusivity diversity piece and i came into this space as a political scientist um there were almost no political theorists or political activists or political operatives when i came into the space there were also very few women very few people that had expertise in communication in leadership development so diversity includes not just your identity but also what kind of expertise perspective experience you've had and i think just because we're better than silicon valley doesn't mean we should like start um claiming the diversity inclusivity banner personally i think it's good to recognize where we're succeeding um but i i just i feel like because we're not just designing the internet or designing some new tech field we're redesigning economic social power political systems like whoa that's a lot of responsibility that's a lot of power and um we need to be really thoughtful so the way i'd go about it would be to think first and foremost about users and global users and how deeply are we using human centered design and everything we're doing and how how close are we to the human beings we say need this technology um and also in our own companies who's there very much so who are the human beings that are actually writing the code and are designers and engineers connecting in a human way do they really hear each other because they speak different languages do we have translators like there's just so much to say about this it could be its own panel i was gonna ask at some point well then what shall we do but then you went ahead and started answering that the first answer was uh user-centered design and uh the composition of the teams and how they understand each other's different perspectives i especially think the user-centered design part has for obvious reason you know understandable reasons been severely lacking until now um and if you don't do that then instead you do like self-centered design and that means uh designing for people who are just like you so i think that's like that's also as well as for this reason it's also better for commercial and impact reasons in general completely yeah yeah um cool yeah there's gobo well yeah just sort of a slightly different human element is well this is the first time that uh i've met my whole team at this conference i mean we've been working together for like years wow so awesome that's uh you know the power of remote but also you know that's interesting bringing it back physical and having the apps help induce that um and just to add like it really makes a vast tangible difference if you hire people from different backgrounds with different life experiences right uh one example uh we were using at one point uh you know our website was still very much uh web 2.0 and we had uh google capture on there and uh when way like wave hey came on board he's like hey you know that doesn't work in china like all the people you're trying to reach the 1.3 billion that people that live there like it doesn't work like google captures like outlawed right and you're like oh right yeah thanks and like you know they've been there for six months like you know and there you go like bam right here's someone who actually knows some stuff because he comes from a different background to all the people who live in like helsinki yep i agree um gotta think about the who and i didn't as well i wanna i don't know if there's is there a mic in the crowd it doesn't look like it uh does does anybody like let's have time for one question if someone has a question uh if you want to come up if you don't i'll ask one final question oh yeah come up come up come up slash yell it out loud and i can repeat it yeah yeah cool me know i'm gonna repeat it back yeah exactly so the the macro question thank you is uh also for our live stream viewers um the macro question is how should we think about governance especially with these new when you think about the kinds of institutions that exist in the world there are like nation states and those have good governance systems like companies and we already know how those are governed and now we think about these you just say they have good sorry sorry sorry sorry we understand they have uh solid we we know what their governance systems look like or they've been worked on for a while yeah sorry um and so ones that we have less clarity on are how to govern these new open source software projects and these new protocols and the specific question here is how do you balance um something like hey let's just let the crowd decide um versus something like hey there's this unique set of like really passionate people that have a lot of domain expertise maybe let's let them decide so how do you think about governance uh for these platforms in general um there was a panel on ethereum governance which i thought was just fascinating in and of itself uh so this like okay so we haven't really talked about in that sense uh what aragon are doing uh there's also another platform uh which i really like uh it's not live yet colony um i think they're here uh some of the some of the guys from that team and and uh getting decentralized government uh governance off the ground is really difficult but i think we can finally do it now that you have those like token incentive models uh and that makes it so fascinating because it finally means that all those stakeholders are finally taken into account right because at the moment you basically ignore a lot of people through traditional government governance models like whether it's a government you're like okay let's just ignore most people here because we can't fit them all in a building it's really inconvenient to get them in one place in any way how do we do that right it's actually really archaic right corporate governance structures again same issues so finally like all those little micro things that people do uh can be taken to into account in some way one issue with that is that you don't want to do is to monetize everything right actually that behavioral economics tells us like there's a warning caveat on that which is like you could really undermine human natural like human behavior by monetizing it because suddenly people don't want to do it if they're not getting paid and that's a problem in and of itself um i guess i'll say i love this question um i kind of want to again take it a little bigger um which is that there's uh developmental psychology around ethics which is pretty widely accepted which says there's kind of three core stages of development of ethical development and the first is independent or they call it preconditional and that's where you're focused on the self the second is interdependent oh sorry dependent where you're focused on kind of society right this is the stage we're in i'd say where there's you know central authorities are making rules about what's right and wrong and they're creating law and the third which i don't think as a civilization we've actually really hit which is interdependent um which is post conventional and it's focused on you know mutual respect so my hope would be that actually cryptocurrencies and blockchain challenge us to figure out what are the ethics of interdependence like how do we actually have an ethics that integrates the individual and the collective i don't think we've really seen that so answering the question of how we do it i feel like it's it's it's so that is the question but i don't think we have an answer and i think we're at the forefront of that evolution as a culture as a society um and that's exciting it is exciting uh so with that excitement uh go ethically build your things and let's thank our panelists one final time