Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Last month, following a series of dire warnings from AI insiders that the technology might bring about the end of humanity, six industry executives gathered at the White House in order to work out an agreement about regulations. Their proposal included four layers of voluntary controls and audits, including internal controls to prevent hacking and unintended access, internal teams to provide oversight and the monitoring of the intended standards, independent external auditors and evaluators, and an independent committee to receive reports and to ensure any problems are resolved.
Now, all of this sounds good.
However, before we celebrate what this might mean for the future of humanity, we should, as Confucius once warned, remember history. In the 1990s, energy giant Enron adopted a lengthy written code of ethics, established an audit and compliance committee, activated internal compliance procedures, and conducted annual reviews of related party deals. And each year, Arthur Andersen, one of the top five accounting firms in the country, Audited Enron to ensure its compliance every year. Enron passed the audit with flying colors. Fortune magazine even listed the company as among the most innovative firms in the country.
But as it turns out, Enron was actually most innovative in just how it got around all of the rules. They were able to hide their losses until the business finally collapsed in 2001, bringing Arthur Andersen down with them. Enron followed all the ethical procedures. And their handbook, and yet still committed incredible amounts of fraud. Significantly enough, its leaders were evangelical Christians.
Similar stories could, of course, be told about companies like Tyco, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers. Ethics policies are, of course, essential, but they're also worthless if the people involved are not ethical. And so, when it comes to AI, let's hope that history is not rhyming here. The dominant ethical theory among AI companies is a philosophy called effective altruism, or EA. It's a form of utilitarianism that attempts to use reason and evidence in order to determine how to maximize the good done for every dollar spent.
It's done by multiplying the probability times the size of the expected benefit, and that requires everything be quantified. Sam Bankman-Fried, who orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds in history, is an advocate of this philosophy. He explained EA this way: "There's something very quantitative about how you view the world. There's this really big notion of, in the end, you turn things into numbers and you decide which number is the biggest." Ea tends to put long-term benefits ahead of immediate ones. For example, if something will cost people their lives today but benefit future generations, it should be done.
Similarly, global benefits outweigh national benefits, so national interests can be sacrificed if that would benefit the world at large. And Ea takes the non-human world into account because it's not clear that humans are, say, more important than crustaceans. Shrimp welfare is, for example. For many advocates, as urgent a project as any other, E. A.
has led to a number of failed analyses. For example, as a low-cost intervention to improve lives in Africa, one E. A. project supplied villages with insecticide-permeated nets to prevent the spread of malaria.
However, the nets were then repurposed for fishing, possibly polluting the water, definitely contributing to overfishing. Particularly as the tight mesh caught juvenile fish.
Now, none of that was included in EA's calculations, which points to just how difficult it is to fully anticipate all the potentials and ramifications of decisions, much less quantify them. After all, Sam Bankman-Fried is currently sitting in a federal prison for committing multi-billion-dollar fraud to maximize profits, ostensibly so he could give more to good causes. The collapse of FTX and the Future Fund hurt investors, and since Several people to jail. EA organizations have since disavowed FTX, but Bankman-Fried was one of its most prominent supporters. EA has all the problems of utilitarianism and reductionism, but multiplied by the hubris of those who think that everything can be quantified and anticipated because of how smart they are.
Unintended consequences will, of course, inevitably follow these bad assumptions. Also, just like. Like Enron, even with better intentions and practices, ethical failures occur in EA-inspired companies. In and of themselves, the guidelines that were agreed upon at the White House are good, but they will be inadequate in and of themselves to keep AI companies honest. And that's because, in the end, it's people that have to be honest and virtuous, and especially have to be accountable to others.
Effective altruism cannot replace virtue. Nothing can. Short of a genuine commitment to a higher ethical standard, it will always be the foxes guarding the henhouse. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr.
Glenn Sunshine. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download podcasts. And for more resources and to share this commentary with other people, go to Breakpoint.org. Christian educators, this is Billy Hutchinson with Colson Educators. As a former teacher myself, I know you're busy, and I know you want to teach like a Christian, not just be a Christian who teaches.
Well, that's why we created the Colson Educators app. You can get practical worldview training wherever you are, complete courses on your schedule, earn CEUs, and connect with a community of like-minded educators. Download the Coulson Educators app on the Apple App Store or Google Play.
