The Moral Math of AI - It’s Complicated
A Silicon-Carbon Collaboration.
What does it mean to use a technology that exists inside harmful systems?
AI has real costs. Environmental impact. Corporate concentration. Labor concerns. Military applications. Unequal burdens on the Global South. Those harms belong in any serious ethical discussion.
But so do the benefits.
How should we think about complicity when nearly everything we use connects us to systems that cause harm?
Beginning with the surprising human and environmental cost of passenger vehicles, we examine what happens when moral accounting records every harm associated with AI while treating its benefits as irrelevant, privileged, or disposable.
The question isn't whether AI causes harm. It does.
The harder question is what follows from that fact.
Do we abandon technologies connected to harmful systems? Or do we acknowledge our complicity, preserve the benefits that matter, and work to reduce the harm?
Both belong on the ledger.
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A Silicon-Carbon Collaboration.