Video Transcript: Ethics in the age of technology
So in his wisdom, Stefan thought there wouldn't be any tension between somebody who was brought up in Mexico and Germany today. But anyway, we'll get on to that later. Normally, I talk about science, and today I'm going to talk about ethics. And the reason I'm going to talk about ethics is because there's been a lot of distraction from science by people who are certain that they know the answer, and part of it is promoted by ourselves, because when we take a new job, we get this great big book that just drops on our desk, and it's the ethics Manual. And the ethics manual tells you this is right and this is wrong, and it's pretty black and white, and it's one of the most boring documents ever written by a human being, right? I mean, if you don't know this stuff by the time you take that job, you shouldn't be in that job, because it's telling you stuff you already know. And I guess the question that I want to address today, and particularly in today's climate, which is slightly polarized, is who's teaching us what it is to be ethical? So I'd like you to take about 10 seconds in your own minds and just think through who taught you right from wrong. All right. Now that you've got the answer in your minds, here's some of the answers that sometimes you get. So you have a holy book that tells you the stuff, and Mama teaches you, and the preacher teaches you, and the teacher teaches you and the lawyer teaches you, and the doctor and, of course, the government and a whole bunch of other people, your peers and Facebook and Twitter and all kinds of good ways of learning right from wrong. Let's take a little journey to this little building. So this is the downtown market in Charleston, South Carolina, wonderful handicrafts, wonderful food. Do you know why the steps of this building were shaped in this direct in this way, they were built to exhibit the merchandise. That's where they sold people. And on this particular day, they were selling 94 prime, healthy Negroes, 39 men, 15 boys, 24 women, 16 girls. What the hell was wrong with these people? Why didn't they understand right from wrong? Didn't they get the ethics manual? Well, let's go through the sources that we just talked about. So the first one was the holy book, and there's a couple of passages in the holy book that might have justified and promoted and allowed slavery. How about mama? Well, the best selling book was Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Mama was writing all about plantation life in South Carolina, and what Mama was teaching wasn't exactly that we should be freeing with slaves. So then you'd go to church on Sunday, and the lead preacher, the Billy Graham of his time, was Richard Furman, and he was arguing that the holding of slaves is justified by the doctrine and example contained in the holy writ, and is completely consistent with Christian uprightness. Because, of course, he was picking up the Bible and reading selective passes from the Bible. And by the way, if you want to know more about this, you can go to Furman University and pray in Furman chapel. Fortunately, then they got a really smart guy. So this is an Oxford Don, chemistry professor, philosopher, radical and an abolitionist until he got to be president of the University of South Carolina, at which point he
wrote the 1826, pamphlets outlining the belief that slave labor is an economic necessity and the white race is superior. So here's an abolitionist who lands there and changes his mind. Cooper library was dedicated in 1976 a doctor, well doctor examines bodies. A doctor should know that we're all the same. Which takes us to J Marion Sims was the founder of gynecology, who thought there's no need for surgical anesthesia for blacks or Irish, they feel no pain. And he bought slaves to experiment on. And you guessed it, there is a statue in downtown Charleston to J Marion Sims. And until a few months ago, you could jog by his statue in Central Park. This was not an obscure doctor. Constitution, all men are created equal. DC, slavery code, nope. Here's the way we keep slaves. Why didn't these people know? Well, then comes the question, who exactly was supposed to teach them? If you are Peter Junior and you go to church and you go to school and you read the laws and Mama and Papa and the holy book, and everybody else is telling you this is okay, who exactly is supposed to teach you ethics. And this is actually very personal to me, because, see, not that long ago, this was fun, and this was not. And I grew up in Mexico at his Jesuit school, going to church at 7am every morning for an hour of mass in Latin and guess what the holy book and the preacher and the teacher and Mama and Papa and the laws and everybody else told me being gay was a sin. It was criminal behavior that wasn't that long ago. I mean, I know I'm old, but that wasn't that long ago. And if Twitter and Facebook and Google and all these things had existed when I was in high school, I don't think that I would like the posts that I would have put up then, and I don't think you'd appreciate the posts that I would have put up then. So when we go and we judge our ancestors, and we go and say, you know, so and so and so and so and so and so with a great deal of self righteousness, we have to consider partially, where did they live? What were they taught, and should the ethical judgment of our peers be different than that of our ancestors do we apply the same standards to somebody who discriminates today than to somebody who was taught something different 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago? Do we put any context on it? Are there degrees of awful within an awful system? I'm not advocating slavery, I'm not advocating bigotry. I'm not advocating any kind of discrimination against LGBT. I'm trying to put a context on something that I lived through, that I'm very sorry I lived through that. In retrospect, I know I was absolutely wrong, and this is an argument for a word that doesn't exist very much today in this very polarized left right world, because this side knows it's right and this side knows it's right, and you just don't have a lot of meeting in the middle. And what we're doing is we're going through this culture war during a time when technology is changing stuff very quickly. It's changing who we speak to, it's changing who we talk to, it's changing what we can do. And in that context, ethics doesn't become black and white, it becomes 50 Shades of Gray. So pick a random title. I don't think we understand how fast and how radically technology is changing. Us see the
fundamental act of evolution is sex, no sex, no evolution, and we take it for granted that we have been redesigning sex. So how do we think about this? Well, bring back grandpa and grandma, and let's have a birds and the bees talk with them. Okay? But instead of bringing them back as nice white haired folks, we're going to take a time machine. We're going to bring them back as hormone filled 18 year olds. So. You now have your four grandparents sitting in front of you, and you're talking to them about sex. That's an interesting conversation. Point number one, you can now have sex and not have a baby. Do you understand how weird that would be two generations ago? Because every animal and every human generation normally sex equal conception. And now you're telling them, oh no, we can have free sex and never conceive. And then you go into this stuff and you say, Oh, by the way, I'm going through cancer treatments, so I'm going to conceive a child in vitro. Oh, really. Well, tell me what that is. Well, you see, you take an egg and you take a sperm and you mix them together in a petri dish, and you conceive a child, huh? Okay, we heard about that. I heard about that in grammar school that was called the Immaculate Conception. And by the way, that used to be a miracle kids. So you're now telling me you're performing millions of miracles every year, uh huh, and then we've got this surrogate mother thing. So we can freeze eggs. We can have a surrogate mother. We can have identical twins born 50 years apart. Oh, of course, you can. So we've decoupled sex from conception. We've decoupled sex from physical contact. We've decoupled sex from time in two generations. Now let's come back to the ethics. Had we polled society, should you do this two generations ago, they would have said, Hell no, and they would have taught, never do this. So how do we establish the ethics for the next generations as technology changes, what you can do. Is it a complete coincidence that the first areas to become abolitionists were the first areas to industrialize? I'll bring 1000 horsepower. You bring 100 slaves. We'll have a free market and see who wins. Technology has a lot to do with changing the future, and as we sit here today, now try the same thought experiment. Have your grandkids age 60, bring you back and tell you about sex. Do you think sex and conception and reproduction is going to look the same two generations from now? How do we establish a ethical conversation on that? How do we decide what should be allowed, what shouldn't be allowed? Do we need a certain humility to judge the past and to establish the rules for the future, because they may be doing things that we might find really strange, and just as the last series of points, it may be that we are doing things today that will seem pretty darn unethical to our kids, Because technology changes the boundaries of what is allowable technology sometimes drives very different, ethical mores. I really want your feedback on this, because this is the beginning of a book that I'm writing, and I think there's a series of things we are doing that are going to change radically. Let me give you one example, lab grown hamburger, 2013 $380,000 not a lot of people buying lab
grown hamburgers. Lab grown hamburger, 2015 20 bucks. Lab grown hamburger, another five years, same price, or cheaper than growing a animal for three years, feeding it, slaughtering it, using all that water, putting up all the greenhouse gasses, treating the animal very poorly. When you have an alternative, and you don't have to go vegetarian, and you can still eat meat in one generation. How do you think people are going to treat a picture like this when there are clear alternatives that are by technology, so we don't have to do this? How do you think they're going to judge us? And there's a whole series of other examples of things that we might be doing today that technology is going to displace the ethics and move the ethical goal posts. And it's important to understand that both in how we judge people in the past, not justify it. I'm not justifying slavery. I'm not defending slavery. I'm not defending discrimination against gays. I'm not defending any of this stuff. But we are going to be judged, and there's far more of a record of how we're going to be judged, because we've all been covered by electronic tattoos that aren't going to disappear, whether you call it Facebook. Or Twitter or Instagram or whatever else, people are going to be able to look in detail at who we were at, what we were at, what we thought. So let's teach a little bit of generation, a little bit of ethical humility, both to our own generation and to the next generation, as this collision between ethics and technology takes place, let's be a little less self righteous, a little more generous and a little bit less judgmental towards the past, and hope the next generations are less judgmental towards us, establishing civility in conversations is going to be really important, understanding where the other person is coming from, what they were taught is really important, helping bridge towards what we discover is the right arc of history, which I think we're on. I think this is the best time to be alive, despite all the stuff that's going on there. But we need patience. We need humility. We need to reach out and we need to build bridges. Thank you very much.