Two weeks ago I celebrated the one-year anniversary of my return to Finland. Well, I didn’t actually celebrate as such – it was a Tuesday like any other. Looking back to that day in 2020, I can’t help but find the contrast of expectation versus reality slightly amusing; I’d decided to travel home in style and booked a business-class ticket, so there I was, lounging in my comfy seat with a pleasant warmth spreading inside me from a nice hot breakfast, complimentary champagne, memories of Ireland and thoughts of all the good things ahead now that I was coming home for good. Little did I know! 

I don’t know how many people would agree with me on this, but considering how quickly this first full year back in Finland has zoomed by (no online meetings pun intended), I have to conclude that time does actually fly even under the present circumstances. Finland, of course, has had it a good deal easier than a lot of other countries, and the summer was even verging on normal, although I did have to cancel my planned trip to the UK and I’m not hugely optimistic about the chances of it happening this year either. The end of the year, I’ll admit, was a bit rough, but then, it tends to be wearying even in the best of times so I can’t blame it all on the pandemic. 

There was something satisfyingly symbolic about the way the year changed. I spent New Year’s Eve at home, accompanied by my pet rabbit, entertaining myself by watching a Jean-Michel Jarre concert that was virtual in more than one sense: besides being an online-only event, the video stream didn’t even show Jarre performing in a physical location but rather an avatar of him in a VR environment based on Notre-Dame de Paris. (Another Ireland memory there – one of the songs I rehearsed with the DCU Campus Choir was a short tribute piece written by an Irish composer after the April 2019 fire.) The weather, having been kind of iffy all December, took a wintry turn during the night and it began to snow heavily, as if to wipe the slate clean for the coming year. By noon the following day the world had turned so gloriously white that I felt compelled to go out on my bike and take some pictures. 

For some reason – well, for a number of reasons I suppose – I’ve found it quite hard to get any kind of writing done in the past couple of months. I wanted to do some work on my rejected manuscript during the Christmas break, but I struggled to find the motivation and finally got it submitted to another journal just a couple of weeks ago. Last week I finished my share of the work for the latest run of our Towards Data Mining course, so with those two major items ticked off my to-do list and the kick-off of the new AI ethics course still a month away, I felt justified to turn my attention to the blog, which I’ve been neglecting (again). 

Ah yes, the ethics course. I say “still a month away”, but in reality I’m already getting stressed about it. It’s coming up pretty well, but it’s still far from ready for launch, and I keep worrying that it’s going to fail spectacularly because of some rookie mistake. Feeling nervous about lecturing is one thing, but there’s a lot more to prepare than just an individual lecture or two. On top of that it’s all being created more or less from scratch, and this whole online teaching thing is also still kind of new and in the process of taking shape, so there are dozens of critically important things that we might get all wrong or just completely forget to do – in my mind at least, if not necessarily in reality. 

I am very much enjoying preparing my lectures, though. Perhaps the biggest problem with the subject matter is that as much as I love philosophy, it can be a bit of a rabbit hole: once you get started with questioning your assumptions, and the assumptions behind those assumptions, you’ll soon find yourself questioning everything you believe in, which isn’t a great place to be when you’re supposed to be confidently imparting knowledge to others. On an applied ethics course it wouldn’t make sense to spend a lot of time exploring ethical theories that are of little relevance to the sort of issues the students can expect to encounter in the real world – and I wouldn’t be qualified to teach those anyway – but it also wouldn’t seem right to just handwave all the theory away and discuss the issues on an ad-hoc basis. 

What’s needed here is a framework that makes it possible to make meaningful normative statements and have a productive debate about them without taking forever to set up. As I was thinking about this recently, I was struck by the realisation that it’s actually pretty amazing that we are, in fact, able to have meaningful discussions about ethics, considering that there are some very fundamental things about it that we can’t agree on. Put two random people together and they may hold radically different views on the foundations of ethics, yet the odds are that each of them uses ethical concepts in a way that’s perfectly recognisable to the other. Theoretically, you could argue that ethical statements are completely subjective or even essentially meaningless, but it’s hard to sustain such arguments when you look at how well, in reality, we are able to understand each other on matters of right and wrong. 

Similarly, if you immerse yourself too deeply in metaethical nitpicking, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that despite all our differences and disagreements, ethics works. It may seem outright heretical to view ethics as an instrument, but if you do that, you have to conclude that it does a really good job of enabling people to live together as functional communities. It’s hardly a perfect system, and there will always be some unwanted things slipping through the cracks, but that doesn’t make the system useless, or meaningless, or nonexistent. Like many of the more abstract systems that human societies are built upon, it ultimately depends on enough people believing in it, but on the whole, we as a species seem to be pretty good at believing in such things. 

Another thing we’re good at is developing technology, and that’s what makes technology ethics – including AI ethics – so important in my view. We do, of course, have laws to regulate technology and we keep making new ones, but the process of legislation tends to lag behind the process of technological change, and the social change that comes with it. As a technology researcher I believe that technology is primarily a force for good, but we need a frontline defence against harmful excesses, something capable of pre-empting them rather than just reacting to them: a strong ethical tradition involving all developers and appliers. If I can do my modest part in cultivating such a tradition among future AI engineers, then the new course will be something to feel at least a little bit proud of.