Created by Simone Rebaudengo & Matthieu Cherubini, Ethical Things is a project that explores the effects of autonomous systems of the future, speculating on how complex algorithms may not only be concerned with decisions we can’t solve but what happens to the mundane and insignificant objects that occupy everyday lives and what their future might be.
If a “smart” coffee machine knows about its user’s heart problems, should it accept giving him a coffee when he requests one? Even with such a banal situation, the level of complexity of such ‘smart’ products cannot accommodate all parties. The system will be designed to take into account certain inputs, to process a ‘certain’ type of information under a ‘certain’ kind of logic.
The team asks how are these “certainties” defined, and by whom? How are these autonomous systems going to be able to solve problems without objective answers? And, moreover, as the nature of ethics is very subjective, how will machines be able to deal with the variety of profiles, beliefs, and cultures?
The project looks at how an object, facing everyday ethical dilemmas, can keep a dose of humanity in its final decision while staying flexible enough to accommodate various ethical beliefs. In attempting to answer this, their “ethical fan” (pictured below) connects to a crowd-sourcing website every time it faces an ethical dilemma. It posts the dilemma it’s facing and awaits the help of one of the “workers”, or mechanical turks, who will tell the fan how to behave. It assures that the decision executed by the system is the fruit of real human moral reasoning. In addition the fan is designed to let the user set various traits (such as religion, degree, sex, and age) as criterion to choose the worker who should respond to the dilemma, in order to assure that a part of the user’s culture and belief system is in line with the worker, or ethical agent.
The project was created using Arduino Yun, Python, Crowdsourcing websites (rapidworkers, jobboy, …), PHP, and jQuery.
Project Page | Simone Rebaudengo | Matthieu Cherubini
