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Automation & Ethics

Suomi: Heronin aeolipiili Türkçe: Yunanlı mühe...


Hero of Alexandria (born around 10 AD) is credited with developing the first steam engine, the first vending machine and the first known wind powered machine (a wind powered musical organ). Given the revolutionary impact of the steam engine centuries later, it might be wondered why the Greeks did not make use of these inventions in their economy. While some claim that the Greeks simply did not see the implications, others claim that the decision was based on concerns about social stability: the development of steam or wind power on a significant scale would have certainly displaced slave labor. This displacement could have caused social unrest or even contributed to a revolution.

While it is somewhat unclear what prevented the Greeks from developing steam or wind power, the Roman emperor Vespasian was very clear about his opposition to a labor saving construction device: he stated that he must always ensure that the workers earned enough money to buy food and this device would put workers out of work.

While labor saving technology has advanced considerably since the time of Hero and Vespasian, the basic questions remain the same. These include the question of whether to adopt the technology or not and questions about the impact of such technology (which range from the impact on specific individuals to the society as a whole).

Obviously enough, each labor saving advancement must (by its very nature) eliminate some jobs and thus create some initial unemployment. For example, if factory robots are introduced, then human laborers are displaced. Obviously enough, this initial impact tends to be rather negative on the displaced workers while generally being positive for the employers (higher profits, typically).

While Vespasian expressed concerns about the impact of such labor saving devices, the commonly held view about much more recent advances is that they have had a general positive impact. To be specific, the usual narrative is that these advances replaced the lower-paying (and often more dangerous or unrewarding) jobs with better jobs while providing more goods at a lower cost. So, while some individuals might suffer at the start, the invisible machine of the market would result in an overall increase in utility for society.

This sort of view can and is used to provide the foundation for a moral argument in support of such labor saving technology. The gist, obviously enough, is that the overall increase in benefits outweighs the harms created. Thus, on utilitarian grounds, the elimination of these jobs by means of technology is morally acceptable. Naturally, each specific situation can be debated in terms of the benefits and the harms, but the basic moral reasoning seems solid: if the technological advance that eliminates jobs creates more good than harm for society as a whole, then the advance is morally acceptable.

Obviously enough, people can also look at the matter rather differently in terms of who they regard as counting morally and who they regard as not counting (or not counting as much). Obviously, a person who focuses on the impact on workers can have a rather different view than a person who focuses on the impact on the employer.

Another interesting point of concern is to consider questions about the end of such advances. That is, what the purpose of such advances should be. From the standpoint of a typical employer, the end is obvious: reduce labor to reduce costs and thus increase profits (and reduce labor troubles). The ideal would, presumably, to replace any human whose job can be done cheaper (or at the same cost) by a machine. Of course, there is the obvious concern: to make money a business needs customers who have money. So, as long as profit is a concern, there must always be people who are being paid and are not replaced by unpaid machines. Perhaps the pinnacle of this sort of system will consist of a business model in which one person owns machines that produce goods or services that are sold to other business owners. That is, everyone is a business owner and everyone is a customer. This path does, of course, have some dystopian options. For example, it is easy to imagine a world in which the majority of people are displaced, unemployed and underemployed while a small elite enjoys a lavish lifestyle supported by automation and the poor. At least until the revolution.

A more utopian sort of view, the sort which sometimes appears in Star Trek, is one in which the end of automation is to eliminate boring, dangerous, unfulfilling jobs to free human beings from the tyranny of imposed labor. This is the sort of scenario that anarchists like Emma Goldman promised: people would do the work they loved, rather than laboring as servants to make others wealthy. This path also has some dystopian options. For example, it is easy to imagine lazy people growing ever more obese as they shovel in cheese puffs and burgers in front of their 100 inch entertainment screens. There are also numerous other dystopias that can be imagined and have been explored in science fiction (and in political rhetoric).

There are, of course, a multitude of other options when it comes to automation.


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The Sharing Economy III: Resources (Human & Other)

Olathe Human Resources

Olathe Human Resources (Photo credit: City of Olathe, KS)

In my previous two essays I wrote about the new sharing economy, focusing on regulations and taxes. In this essay I will cover resources (human and other). As noted in the previous two essays, the new sharing economy is exemplified by companies such as Uber and Airbnb that serve to organize transactions between individuals. In the case of Uber, people can serve as drivers for Uber selling rides in their own cars—without (as of this writing) all the usual costs and regulations of operating a cab. In the case of Airbnb, people can rent out property and (as of this writing) generally avoid the usual regulation and taxes associated with running a hotel.

For the people providing the goods and services, the new sharing economy makes it easier for people to make money. In general, the new sharing economy involves three parties. The first is the person who provides the actual good (apartment, for example) or service (a ride to the airport, for example). The second is the person who uses the service and the third is the company that provides the organizing service (often via an app) While this is an old model (people have long offered services and goods via things like newspaper ads), technological advances have changed the scale of this once informal economy. It has also served to blur the traditional roles somewhat. To be specific, those who provide the goods and services are not actually employees of the organizing services and those using the goods and services are not exactly customers of the organizing services. There are some advantages and some disadvantages in regards to these roles.

In the case of those providing the services and goods, one of the obvious advantages is that they can make money. While they could do this without the organizing service, the service obviously makes this easier and provides other advantages.

One of the advantages of not actually being an employee of the organizing services is that the provider has a high degree of autonomy that is usually absent in the traditional employee-employer relationship. The provider can (within the constraints of economic need) work as little as desired and is free to stop at will. This level of autonomy certainly has considerable appeal to some people—especially people who are looking for a more traditional job while making money to pay the bills. In some ways, the situation is somewhat like being a temp.

Of course, there are some disadvantages to being a provider. One is that doing this is rather like being self-employed in that there are typically no benefits and no job security. Also, the risks and costs tend to fall heavily on the provider. For example, if someone crashes into the company truck Sally is driving, then the company handles the matter. But, if Sally is freedriving for Uber and her car is hit, this is most likely going to work exactly as it would if Sally was just driving to Starbucks for a latte—that is, it is on her.

Another point of concern is that the organizer might be in the position to set rates or impose other limits—much like a traditional boss can. For example, Uber can set what drivers are paid on its own

But, this is nothing new—people who do freelance work or are self-employed in the usual sense face all these problems. After all, being the worker is generally not an optimal situation and being what amounts to a temp or freelancer can be even less optimal in terms of security and pay.

There are numerous advantages to the organizing companies. One is that they have people doing the actual work for them (for example, driving people) who are not employees. They also typically have people providing the resources (cars, gas, houses and so on) that are used. While the companies do incur costs in terms of running the organizing functions, they are able to avoid (or significantly reduce) the usual costs of running a business. For example, a hotel needs to have hotel employees (maids, etc.) and an actual hotel. Airbnd does not—the providers provide the services and buildings. As another example, a service that organizes drivers does not need to buy cars, maintain them or insure them—thus resulting in considerable savings.

In essence, the new sharing economy splits management from what would traditionally be the resources (human or otherwise) of a company. The organizer takes on the role of management while avoiding the need to have traditional human resources (beyond the administrative aspects of the business) and the need to have the material resources (beyond those needed for the administrative aspects).

Some companies do operate in something of a hybrid mode—having workers as well as material resources owned by the company while also having a sharing aspect to the business. This is, clearly enough, a variation on the old model of a company hiring temp workers, freelancers and contractors.

This model can, apparently, be very profitable—in large part due to matters of scale. After all, getting a slice of thousands of sales can result in a nice profit. Also, many of these companies benefit from internet inflation—the almost magical overvaluation of companies with business models based on the internet.

Given the apparent success of companies like Uber and Airbnd, it is reasonable to expect other companies to spring into existence to create what might be a new internet bubble—the sharing bubble. Of course, there are some clear limits on what sort of companies can exist—for example, airlines and heavy manufacturing are not really fit for the sharing economy. However, additional advances in economy might see some new realms for the sharing economy. For example, if 3D printers become truly viable, light and specialized manufacturing might become part of the sharing economy.


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The Sharing Economy I: Regulation

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The Cost of Litter

English: Littering in Stockholm

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Men, Women, Business & Ethics

Journal of Business Ethics

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Minimum Wage II: Freedom & Coercion



Money (Photo credit: 401(K) 2013)







rking for the lowest wage or not working at all.







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Minimum Wage I: Arguments Against

Minimum Wage In Paraguay, one simple figure

Minimum Wage In Paraguay, one simple figure (Photo credit: WageIndicator – Paulien Osse)

The United States government, like many other government, sets a minimum wage. This is the lowest (with some exceptions) that an employee can be paid per hour. There is considerable debate regarding the minimum wage ranging from disputes over the exact amount of the wage to arguments over whether there should be a minimum wage at all.

Some arguments over the minimum wage are grounded in concerns about economic facts. For example, there is some dispute about the economic impact of the minimum wage. Some contend that increasing it would increase inflation (which would presumably be bad) while some claim that increasing it would boost the economy by increasing spending. In terms of what should be done, these disputes fall nicely within the realm of consequentialism. That is, settling them involves sorting out the facts about the consequences. There would also be some moral aspects to the matter as well, such as sorting out the positive values and negative values based on who they impact and how.

Other arguments about the minimum wage are more ideological in nature and have minimum (or no) connection to matters of economic facts. These arguments tend to be philosophically interesting because of the strong connection to matters of morality.

One argument against the minimum wage is based on the notion that it causes a culture of dependency that interferes with the mobility of labor. The idea, at least as presented in various talking points in the more conservative media, is that a higher (or any) minimum wage would encourage people to simply stick with the minimum wage job rather than moving upwards in the economic hierarchy.

On the one hand, this has a certain appeal. If a person believes that she is earning enough and making a comfortable living, then she might very well be content to remain at that job.

On the other hand, there seem to be some rather obvious problems with this argument. First, unless the minimum wage were increased dramatically, it seems unlikely that anyone would be able to make a comfortable living on such a wage. It also seems unlikely that most people would be content to simply stop at the minimum wage job and refuse opportunities for better employment. People generally stick with minimum wage jobs because they cannot find a better job not because they think they are making quite enough. I would not claim that it is impossible for a person to live what he thinks is a comfortable life on minimum wage nor that a person might be content to just stick with such a job. However, such a person would be an unusual exception rather than one among a vast crowd.

Second, this sort of reasoning seems to be based on the problematic principle that it is necessary to pay people poorly in order to motivate them to move up the economic hierarchy. One problem with this principle is that it would warrant paying people poorly all the way up the economic ladder so as to allegedly motivate them. After all, if people are content to coast at minimum wage, then they would surely be willing to coast if the pay was better. This would thus seem to entail that only the topmost position in a hierarchy should not pay poorly since there would be nothing above that position and hence no need to motivate a person to move beyond it. Interestingly, this does seem to match the nature of CEO salaries—it is common for the CEO to make many times what lesser employees make. Since the number of topmost positions is rather limited, this would seem to be rather unfair. In fact, if this principle is pushed, it would seem to point towards having one position in total that has good pay—thus motivating everyone to attempt to get that one position.

Another problem with this principle is that it seems to be untrue. As a matter of fact, people do attempt to get higher paying jobs when they are available, even if their pay is not poor. People mostly seem to stick with a minimum wage job or a lower paying job because they cannot find one that pays better (there are, of course, other reasons).

As a final point, the idea that paying people to do work creates a culture of dependency seems to indicate the view that the workers are mooching or sponging off the employer. This is, obviously enough, absurd: the worker is getting paid for work done which is the exact opposite of mooching.

A second ideological argument is based on the notion of liberty and rights. The idea is that employers are having their liberty (or rights) violated by being forced by the state to pay a minimum wage.

This line of reasoning does have a certain appeal. After all, people (and corporations are the best sort of people) have rights to liberty and property. If the state tells employers that they must pay a certain wage, the employers are being denied their right to liberty via the coercive power of the state.

There are at least two obvious responses to this line of reasoning. The first is that workers are also people and hence would also have rights, including property rights to their labor. These rights can be used to argue for a minimum wage (or more)—after all, theft of labor would seem to still be theft.  The second is that being part of a society involves, as Locke and Hobbes argued, giving up some rights. While some employers would like the liberty to pay whatever they wanted (which might be nothing—slavery was and is rather popular), it makes sense that such complete freedom would not be consistent with society. Having a civil society, as Hobbes argued, does require the coercive power of the state. As such, the fact that the state is imposing on the liberty of the employer does not automatically entail that this coercion is wrong. The stale also imposes on the liberties of those who would like to steal and kill and these impositions are hardly wrong.

The obvious reply is to contend that while the state has a legitimate right to limit some liberties, this right does not extend to coercing job creators into paying at least a minimum wage. This cannot, of course, be simply assumed—what is needed is an argument that employers should have the liberty to pay as they please. Even if such a liberty is assumed, surely it would have at least some limit. At the very least, it would seem that an employer has to pay more than nothing. Then again, some might like to see slavery put back on the table. There is much more to be said about minimum wage and more essays will follow.


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Ethics, Charity and Overhead

Curing the Charitable Curse

Curing the Charitable Curse (Photo credit: jurvetson)



One interesting aspect of this matter, as noted by Pallotta, is that there do seem to be two sets of standards in regards to non-profits and for-profits. In the case of for-profit entities, generous compensation for top talent is often regarded as acceptable and even necessary. In the case on non-profits, generous compensation for the top talent is often regarded as wrong—those people should be willing to accept less compensation because they are supposed to be working for charity. In the case of for-profits, it is recognized that running a business involves considerable overhead and hence even relatively small profit margins are regarded as acceptable. In the case of non-profits overhead costs are generally regarded as being automatically bad and are only grudgingly accepted. As such, while a for-profit business is assessed by how well it does in accomplishing goals (how much profit is generated) a non-profit is often assessed in terms of the percentage of overhead.

Following Pallotta, it can be argued that this model is mistaken. If, one might say, charitable non-profits are going to be as successful as the top businesses, then this view must be abandoned. A key part of this, and one that Pallotta stresses, is that non-profits need to switch to the compensation philosophy of the for-profits. That is, they need to generously compensate the top talent. Another part of this is that non-profits and those who support them must change their views of overhead costs—these costs must not be regarded as being automatically bad but rather seen as necessary expenditures in order to accomplish the goals in question.

While this approach does have appeal, the rather large compensation for top talent in the for-profit sector is itself subject to moral criticism.  So, it is worth noting that while the idea of large compensation for the top talent at charitable non-profits is seen as morally wrong, the high compensation of talent in the for-profit sector is regarded by some as merely being less bad.

There is, of course the stock argument that high compensation is needed to actually get the top talent. After all, if charitable non-profits want to get the best people, then they will need to get closer to the compensation offered in the for-profit realm. If, for example, Sally can get $5 million in compensation as a top executive for a corporation and only $80,000 in compensation as an executive for a charity, then it is obvious where Sally should go.

While this does have appeal, there is still the question of whether the compensation is actually just or not. If the top compensation in the for-profit realm is unjustly large, then making the top compensation in the charitable realm comparably unjust would hardly seem to be an ethical thing to do.

That said, a reasonable rejoinder is that is does make sense to offer better pay in order to attract top talent to work on charitable causes. That is, our money should back our professed moral values.  It also does make sense to use the market to address certain problems, but it is obviously not going to help with problems that the market system creates itself—which could be one of the important ironies of this approach to charitable organizations.

An obvious point of concern is that the arguments in favor of accepting high overhead for charitable non-profits could be used as a clever sort of moral cover. That is, they could be sued to allow alleged charities to monetize charitable causes as for-profit companies now monetize natural resources and human labor. The obvious counter to this concern is that this approach could yield more effective results than the existing model. So, one might argue, if the price of a charity finally finding a cure for a disease is that the charity operate like a for-profit business, then it is worth the price.

This is a point well worth considering. As Pallotta has argued, charitable organizations often fail to address the problems they were created to solve. If changing our moral assessment of how charitable non-profits should operate could play a significant role in solving some of these problems, then this approach could be the correct approach. However, if this approach is actually a mere moral cloak to allow profiteering off charitable causes, then this approach would seem to be wrong.

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Ethics & 3D Printing

English: Example of replication of a real obje...

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According to the hype, 3D printers are going to change the world in many positive ways. For example, home 3D printers will allow people to create replacement parts when something breaks. As another example, home 3D printers will allow anyone (with the money) to create their own objects (although much of this will be plastic junk). As a third example, the fact that 3D printers are almost universal machines (that is, they can theoretically make almost anything) will allow cheaper manufacturing. Not surprisingly, there is also a dark side to 3D printing.

One obvious point of moral concern is that such printers can allow people to print their own weapons and use these to harm people. While the first printed gun is not much of a weapon (it essentially a plastic “zip gun”), it did show that guns can be printed using the current technology. As the technology improves, it seems reasonable to believe that much better weapons could be printed, thus allowing the usual suspects (criminals, terrorists, and so on) to secretly print up their own weapons.

While this is a concern, people can and do already make their own weapons. While these weapons are usually fairly crude, they can be quite deadly—as the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013 showed. As such, 3D printing would not seem to significantly increase this sort of threat.

People can also get the metalworking tools needed to make more sophisticated weapons, although these are rather expensive and require skill to operate. Because of this, 3D printing might present an actual threat—a person does not need any special skills to print up a gun, although a printer capable of making an effective gun would probably be rather expensive.

Overall, until the printer technology is cheap and effective enough to print effective guns (that is, comparable to manufactured firearms), they will not present a significant threat. As such, there seems to be (as of now) little moral reason to be worried about this sort of use of 3D printing.

Another matter of obvious moral concern is that 3D printers will allow people to easily and secretly duplicate patented and copyrighted objects. Using a currently available home 3D printer, a person could print up copies of toys, miniatures (for games like D&D), parts and so on. Thus, 3D printing will allow people to do with objects what they have been doing with music, movies and software, namely engaging in piracy.

“Solid piracy” or “3D piracy” does differ from digital piracy in at least one key respect. In the case of printing an object, a person is not stealing the physical object that the manufacturer made. For example, if I were to print a copy of a copyrighted dragon (or gargoyle) miniature for my Pathfinder game, this is rather different from me going to the local gaming store and shoplifting that miniature.

On the one hand, this does seem to be a meaningful difference: by printing the dragon, I am not actually stealing the object. After all, no one is deprived of the object. As such, copying and printing a patented or copyrighted object would not be theft in the usual sense of stealing an actual object. Similar arguments have, of course, been given as to why pirating software, movies and music is not theft.

On the other hand, this does still seem to be theft. While I am not guilty of stealing the matter that makes up my dragon (assuming I did not steal that) I did steal the design of the dragon. For something like a plastic dragon miniature, the matter that makes it up is not the valuable component. Rather, to go with Aristotle, it is the form of the matter. In this case, the form of an imaginary dragon.

This sort of theft of design is nothing new—people have been stealing designs and producing their own objects for quite some time. What is different about 3D printing is that it makes such theft of form very easy. Sticking with my dragon example, before 3D printing it would have been very difficult for me to steal the dragon design/form: I would have had to create a mold of the dragon, melted down the plastic to make it and so on. It would, obviously, be cheaper and easier to just buy the dragon. However, 3D printing would allow me to easily copy the dragon. While there would be the cost of the printer (and perhaps a 3D scanner) and the materials, if I did enough copying and the material was cheap enough, it would also be cheaper to steal the dragon design than buy the dragon.

However, it would still be theft—I would be using the design owned by someone else without providing just compensation and this would be just as wrong as stealing a movie, software or music. Of course, there are those who contend that copying movies, software or music is not theft and they would presumably hold the same view about solid/3D piracy.

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Water & Food

Česky: Pitná voda - kohoutek Español: Agua potable

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