#tech ethics

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This is not a public-safety council.

It’s not a consumer-protection council.

It’s not a council built to ask how AI might wreck jobs, rights, privacy, elections, or basic reality if nobody puts guardrails on it.

It’s a tech power council.

Look at the roster.

Marc Andreessen. Sergey Brin. Safra Catz. Michael Dell. Larry Ellison. Jensen Huang. Lisa Su. Mark Zuckerberg. Fred Ehrsam. David Friedberg. David Sacks co-chairing it with Michael Kratsios.

That’s not some broad public-interest brain trust.

That is a room full of the people most invested in building this technology fast, scaling it hard, and keeping the rules light.

And that would already matter.

But it matters more because this didn’t come out of nowhere.

In December, Trump signed an executive order aimed at knocking state AI laws out of the way.

In March, the White House rolled out a national AI framework built around one federal rulebook, “strong Federal leadership,” and “minimally burdensome” policy.

Now they’re staffing the worldview.

Same project.

New chapter.

This isn’t about safety.

It’s about control.

umm… okay this needs to be said.

we are def not 13 years away from the planet "running out of water" just bc someone generated a cat image with ai. that's super misleading.

so, water scarcity is very real & over 2 billion people lack safe access. but that crisis is about infrastructure, inequality, agriculture, and climate change. it's not a global bathtub draining because of ai prompts.

ai does have an environmental footprint. but like so does streaming stranger things in 4k for six hours. so does gaming online. so does running every social media site we're on right now.

every time we scroll through high-res gifs, art, and videos in tags like #jjk or #mcr, we're pulling data from the same data centers. those centers use water for cooling whether it's ai, netflix, or tumblr dashboards.

if we care about water (and we should), let's talk about real large-scale infrastructure, regulation, agriculture, and corporate energy use, not guilt trip or scare ppl into thinking using ai is killing our planet, k? thanks

Here's it clearly spelled out for you: Do the benefits of large scale AI deployment outweigh its external costs?

Critiquing how the question is asked is not the same as answering it.

Comparing generative AI to spellcheck, calculators, or search engines is completely false equivalence. Those tools do not, will not, and have never mass scraped creative work, generated substitute content at an industrial scale, or required comparable infrastructure.

Saying previous technologies displaced workers is also not justification. Historical repetition doesn't make any of this harm acceptable or tolerable. This would mean that, in "your" eyes, just because it happened before means it's okay for it to happen again?

Also, claiming that AI is "here to stay" is not a defense in the slightest. Persisting systems doesn't equate to legitimacy. We see this logic exemplified via tyrannical regimes, for instance.

On top of that, the whole water argument misses the point entirely. The issue is that many data centers consume major local water resources and strain communities already facing shortages. Saying some use recycled water does not excuse the ones that do not, no?

Although this may not directly affect your everyday life, it's important that you try to put the shoe on the other foot.

You keep conceding AI causes serious harm while refusing to explain why its current deployment is ethically proportionate to said harms.

Again, that is the question.

The disagreement is whether its harms are justified by its present use.

You still have failed to answer that.

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Let’s begin.

Victor Frankenstein would feel perfectly at home among today’s tech titans who build systems of unprecedented reach and then plead neutrality when those systems distort truth, exploit labour, radicalise users, or corrode democratic norms.

Like Victor, they frame themselves as visionaries beset by unintended consequences, as though scale absolves authorship and profit excuses neglect.

Shelley exposes this cowardice with brutal clarity: the monster is not the thing released into the world without choice, but the one who refuses to govern, guide, or restrain what he has made.

When today’s tech leaders insist that AI harms are merely emergent, inevitable, or someone else’s problem, they are replaying Frankenstein’s oldest lie, that creation without care is not culpability.

For the Campfire Learn Together on April 26, 2026, we watched and discussed “How to (Anti) AI Better” by Dr. Fatima. Dr. Fatima’s thesis: shaming individual AI users is counterproductive. The more effective path is harm reduction — meeting people where they are, reducing specific harms, and directing pressure toward systems rather than individuals. This Campfire is a companion to our AI…

Swiss tech company Final Spark now offers Neuroplatform, the world’s first bioprocessing platform using human brain organoids (lab-grown mini-brains) to perform computational tasks instead of silicon chips.

The first such facility uses 16 human-brain organoids, which the company claims uses a million times less power than their silicon counterparts. 

These are not sentences we expected to write non-fictionally in this year of our world 2024.

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