Video and slides synchronized, mp3 and slide download available at URL https://bit.ly/2HwKLfD. Yanqing Cheng takes a philosophical look at personal roles in a shifting world, drawing from history, cognitive science, thought experiments and real world evidence, to answer the question: "what are our ethical responsibilities as tech innovators today?" Filmed at qconlondon.com. Yanqing Cheng is a software development manager at Metaswitch, where she works on high-scale networking systems software. She has 5 years of experience in the industry and comes from a mathematical background. Outside work, she is interested in machine learning and future tech.

1. Responsibly
Smashing Pandora’s
Box
Yanqing Cheng
QCon London
7 March 2018

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philosophy-personal-role
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4. What are our ethical responsibilities as
tech innovators today?

5. Courage

7. What are our ethical responsibilities as
tech innovators today?
• History
• Psychology
• Prior Work
• Worked Examples

8. The Ethics of Tech Innovation
What can we learn from history

9. How do you measure
the ethical impact of
a technology?

12. “A full human genome sequence cost
$100 million in 2002. Today, it can be
done for $1,000.”

13. The world is better today
than it ever was.

14. The Limits of Intuition
Why psychology limits our ethical thinking

15. Thought
Experiment

16. Event costs £210. £20 early-bird discount for
registrations received before May 1st.

17. Event costs £190 for registrations received before
May 1st. £20 penalty fee for late registration.

18. Which pricing policy is more likely to make
you pay early?
Event costs £210. £20 early-bird discount for
registrations received before May 1st.
Event costs £190 for registrations received before
May 1st. £20 penalty fee for late registration.

19. Status Quo Bias
• Humans are inclined to make the “default” or status
quo choice, and consider it better than alternatives
• People feel greater regret for bad outcomes that
result from new actions, than for bad consequences
that are the result of inaction.

20. Scope Insensitivity
• Study asked participants: How much to save x
number of migrating birds from drowning in oil
ponds, by covering the ponds with protective nets?
• Average amount people were willing to donate:
• 2,000 birds:
• $80
• 20,000 birds:
• $78
• 200,000 birds
• $88

22. Our intuitions were
made for a smaller,
slower world.

23. What “Good” Feels Like
Prior work from another field

24. Effective Altruism
“How can we use our limited resources to best
help others?”

25. 10 years x 70% = 7 QALYs
Quality
Time
100%
70 years
Quality
Time
100%
70 years
60 years x 20% = 12 QALYs
THE
QALY APPROACH

26. WHAT IS A QALY
WORTH?
THE NHS IS PREPARED
TO SPEND ABOUT £20,000PER
QALY
£2.30
PER
HOUR

27. WHAT DOES A QALY
COST?
CAN WE GAIN A QALY
FOR LESS THAN £20,000?
YES!
Case Study: HIV/AIDS
It is a major cause of death and disability in developing
countries. Let’s look at the many approaches we might choose.

28. Treatment of Kaposi’s
Sarcoma
Antiretroviral therapy
0 2 4 6 8 10
QALY / £1000
£20,000 per
QALY Barrier
Prevention of Transmission
During Pregnancy
WHAT DOES A QALY
COST?
Source: Disease Control
Priorities Project 2

29. Treatment of Kaposi’s
Sarcoma
Antiretroviral therapy
0 5 10 15 20 25
QALY / £1000
Prevention of Transmission
During Pregnancy
Distribution of Condoms
WHAT DOES A QALY
COST?

30. How do you
maximise the effect
of your donations?

32. Every day, nearly 300 people die from
malaria in Nigeria, the majority of these
deaths are children under the age of five.

33. Imagine a fully booked 747, where three-quarters of
the passengers are children. Every day, this plane
crashes into the Gulf of Guinea, killing everyone on
board. This is malaria – in one country.

34. We are making progress.

38. Ethical choices are
unintuitive.

40. It takes
analysis,
courage and
innovation to
do good
• The right thing can seem unintuitive
• The right thing can seem mundane
• The right thing can seem distasteful

41. The Obligations of Innovators

42. How do you measure
the ethical impact of
a technology?

44. 1.3 million people die from road
traffic injuries ever year.

45. Delaying progress can be
enormously costly.

46. Technological advances will happen
Newton and Leibniz independently formulated calculus
Swan and Edison independently developed incandescent bulbs
RSA was described by GCHQ 4 years before publication by Rivest,
Shamir and Adleman

47. If you don’t do it,
someone else will do it
wrong.

48. Worked examples

49. The impact of Bitcoin
on the environment

50. Ethical risks of
automated decision
algorithms

51. Pandora’s Box

52. Courage

53. “Courage is not the absence
of fear, but rather the
judgement that something
else is more important than
fear.”

54. The world
needs you to
have courage
• Courage to face the problems in the world
• Courage to take responsibility
• Courage to innovate

55. Thank you

56. Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/
philosophy-personal-role