AI Ethics: The Perils of AI Predictions Many reasonable people believe that artificial intelligence is about to have a bigger impact on our world than any development since the Industrial Revolution. Societal and economic change at this scale will inevitably bring with it an unlimited number of ethical challenges. If you are interested in AI and its attendant ethical implications, you will […] View
AI Ethics: “Enshittification” Comes for AI Cory Doctorow writes a lot of science fiction but is best known for his recent and very popular book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It in which he argues that the Big Tech companies like Facebook and Google have ruined the internet by deliberately reducing the quality of their […] View
AI Ethics: The Shaky Future of Truth Dear friends, we must buy truth even if the price is ever so dear. Every parcel of truth is precious as the filings of gold. We must either live it, or die for it.” –Thomas Brooks “AI doesn’t understand facts, truth, or privacy. It is a reckless bull in a china shop, and we should […] View
AI Ethics: The Case for ‘AI for Good’ Ethical decision making must always be based upon a strong and accurate factual foundation. Good people wanting to act ethically in the face of the rapid developments in the realm of artificial intelligence must therefore keep pace with those developments. Should they adopt AI tools or not? Should they lobby for or against government regulation […] View
AI Warfare and Its Implications for Behavioral Ethics As frequent visitors to the Ethics Unwrapped website know, one of our focuses is behavioral ethics, the study of the psychology of moral decision making. Defense correspondent Katrina Manson’s new book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare (2026) prompts us to revisit this topic. As we noted in […] View
AI Warfare Is Already Here. We Need the AI Ethics To Go With It Foreign policy and defense correspondent Katrina Manson’s impressive new book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare (2026) has put the ethics of AI warfare directly in the spotlight, which is good. Although ethical issues surrounding the use of AI to wage war have been considered in detail by […] View
AI Ethics: Moral Certainty Defeated by Factual Uncertainty A year ago today (“today” being the date this blog post is written–February 3, 2026), we published our first of several blog posts on AI ethics, this one titled “AI Ethics: ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am.’” Our central contention was that to make sound moral judgments one must first be in possession of the facts, at […] View
Moral Dissonance, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Measles Two contradictory items came to our attention almost simultaneously a few weeks ago. The first item was a New Yorker article by Shayla Love entitled “Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?” The second was an article on a measles outbreak that presented about as clear and concrete an example of cognitive dissonance as could be […] View
Learning From An Academic Scandal As frequent visitors to Ethics Unwrapped know, our primary focus is upon behavioral ethics—the science of moral decision-making. Behavioral ethics is based on research from such fields as brain science, evolutionary biology, child development, and many others. The most significant contributions come from the discipline of psychology, particularly behavioral psychology. Unfortunately, the field of psychology […] View
AI Ethics: If Someone Builds It, Will We All Die? Many interested in AI have been eagerly awaiting the just-published, provocatively-titled book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowski and Nate Soares. Yudkowski has been a major AI naysayer for 20 years and, with Soares, founded the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in 2005. The […] View