Global South voices ‘marginalised in AI Ethics’; Gates Cambridge, June 27, 2025

  Gates Cambridge; Global South voices ‘marginalised in AI Ethics’

"A Gates Cambridge Scholar is first author of a paper how AI Ethics is sidelining Global South voices, reinforcing marginalisation.

The study, Distributive Epistemic Injustice in AI Ethics: A Co-productionist Account of Global North-South Politics in Knowledge Production, was published by the Association for Computing Machinery and is based on a study of nearly 6,000 AI Ethics publications between 1960 and 2024. Its first author is Abdullah Hasan Safir [2024 – pictured above], who is doing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Design. Other co-authors include Gates Cambridge Scholars Ramit Debnath[2018] and Kerry McInerney [2017].

The findings were recently presented at the ACM’s FAccT conference, considered one of the top AI Ethics conferences in the world. They show that experts from the Global North currently legitimise their expertise in AI Ethics through dynamic citational and collaborative practices in knowledge production within the field, including co-citation and institutional of AI Ethics."

The Military May Find Itself in an Impossible Situation; The New York Times, June 11, 2025

 

Joshua Braver. 

Dr. Braver is an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies civil military relations. , The New York Times; The Military May Find Itself in an Impossible Situation

"Would a military officer disobey a lawful but unethical order — unethical in the sense that it violates the officer’s professional code? We may be on the verge of finding out."

Ethics Alone Can’t Fix Big Tech Ethics can provide blueprints for good tech, but it can’t implement them.; Slate, April 17, 2019

Daniel Susser, Slate;

Ethics Alone Can’t Fix Big Tech

Ethics can provide blueprints for good tech, but it can’t implement them.

"Ethics requires more than rote compliance. And it’s important to remember that industry can reduce any strategy to theater. Simply focusing on law and policy won’t solve these problems, since they are equally (if not more) susceptible to watering down. Many are rightly excited about new proposals for state and federal privacy legislation, and for laws constraining facial recognition technology, but we’re already seeing industry lobbying to strip them of their most meaningful provisions. More importantly, law and policy evolve too slowly to keep up with the latest challenges technology throws at us, as is evident from the fact that most existing federal privacy legislation is older than the internet.

The way forward is to see these strategies as complementary, each offering distinctive and necessary tools for steering new and emerging technologies toward shared ends. The task is fitting them together.

By its very nature ethics is idealistic. The purpose of ethical reflection is to understand how we ought to live—which principles should drive us and which rules should constrain us. However, it is more or less indifferent to the vagaries of market forces and political winds. To oversimplify: Ethics can provide blueprints for good tech, but it can’t implement them. In contrast, law and policy are creatures of the here and now. They aim to shape the future, but they are subject to the brute realities—social, political, economic, historical—from which they emerge. What they lack in idealism, though, is made up for in effectiveness. Unlike ethics, law and policy are backed by the coercive force of the state."