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.