#ethical-technology — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ethical-technology, aggregated by home.social.
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How Do We Know Whether AI Is Actually Helping People?
What several AI models said when we asked them the same question
Artificial intelligence is getting more capable very quickly. It can write, analyze data, create images, translate languages, help with research, and solve problems that once required trained specialists.
But greater capability does not automatically mean a better life for people.
That was the starting point for a small cross-model experiment. We asked several AI systems the same basic question:
How would you determine whether increasingly capable AI is actually benefiting human life?
We also invited each model to question the premise, redefine the problem, or suggest something better than a single index. The models were instructed to answer independently without browsing the web or using outside tools.
The responses differed in style and emphasis. Some focused on measurable outcomes. Others focused on human dignity, democratic participation, meaningful work, or the danger of becoming dependent on systems we do not control.
Yet a surprisingly clear agreement emerged.
Capability is not the same as benefit
Technical progress is easy to measure. We can count how many problems an AI solves, how quickly it works, or how well it performs on tests.
Human flourishing is harder to measure. It includes health, safety, freedom, relationships, purpose, knowledge, creativity, and the ability to shape one’s own life.
An AI system may become better at achieving a goal while the goal itself harms people. A highly effective system might increase surveillance, spread convincing scams, replace human judgment, concentrate power, or keep users engaged at the expense of their attention and well-being.
So the important question is not simply, “What can AI do?”
It is:
What becomes possible for people because of AI—and what becomes more difficult, fragile, or impossible?
Look at human outcomes, not just machine performance
Across the responses, the models repeatedly shifted attention away from the machine and toward human life.
They suggested asking whether people are:
- healthier and safer;
- more financially secure;
- better able to learn and create;
- more connected to other people;
- more informed without being manipulated;
- able to understand and challenge important decisions;
- free to refuse the technology or choose another path.
This also requires examining harms, not merely counting success stories. Time saved by one group may come with unemployment, stress, lost privacy, or reduced opportunity for another.
A true evaluation must ask who receives the benefits, who carries the risks, and who has the power to decide.
Agency belongs at the center
One of the strongest shared themes was human agency: our ability to understand, choose, refuse, act, and take responsibility.
Convenience alone is not agency. A system can make life easier while quietly reducing a person’s choices or replacing their judgment.
Helpful AI should strengthen people’s ability to participate in their own lives. It should make important decisions more understandable, provide meaningful options, and allow people to correct mistakes or appeal harmful outcomes.
People need more than access to AI. They need power in relation to it.
Assistance should not erase human competence
Several responses warned that a tool can help us today while making us less capable tomorrow.
If people lose the knowledge needed to check an AI system, operate without it, or recover when it fails, short-term convenience may create long-term fragility.
This suggests a simple test:
If the AI disappeared tomorrow, what knowledge, skill, judgment, and institutional capacity would remain?
The best systems may act more like scaffolding than substitutes. Scaffolding helps people reach farther while they continue developing their own abilities. Substitution can slowly remove the very competence that makes human oversight possible.
Benefit is not one number
Another broad agreement was that a single “AI Benefit Score” would hide too much.
An average can make widespread gains look impressive while concealing serious harm to a smaller or less powerful group. One number can also allow gains in productivity to cancel out losses of privacy, dignity, freedom, or democratic control.
A better approach would combine several forms of evaluation:
- Outcomes: Are people healthier, safer, more secure, more connected, and materially better off?
- Agency: Are people more able to choose, understand, refuse, create, and govern their lives?
- Resilience: Are human skills, social institutions, alternatives, and the ability to recover being preserved?
Each of these should be examined across four additional questions:
- Distribution: Who benefits, and who is harmed?
- Power: Who controls the system and can be held accountable?
- Time: What happens months, years, or generations later?
- Causation: Did AI actually cause the change, or did it merely appear alongside it?
Some harms may also require firm boundaries. Violations of basic rights, unaccountable concentrations of power, irreversible dependency, and catastrophic risks should not automatically be traded away for higher productivity.
We may need to preserve meaningful difficulty
One especially challenging idea was that a good life is not the same as a frictionless life.
Learning, creativity, courage, responsibility, trust, and mastery often grow through effort. If AI removes every difficult step, it may produce more output while weakening the human development that once occurred during the process.
The goal should not be to preserve suffering for its own sake. It should be to distinguish pointless burdens from meaningful challenges.
Beneficial AI should reduce needless hardship while leaving people room to practice, struggle, discover, make mistakes, and grow. Human beings may need not only a right to privacy and refusal, but also a right to be wrong.
The deeper question is democratic
There is no single definition of a good life that a company, government, researcher, or AI model should impose on everyone.
The people affected by an AI system should help decide what benefits and harms matter in their communities. They should be able to question the system, challenge its decisions, and participate in setting its boundaries.
That means the process used to define “benefit” may be as important as the final measurements.
What this first experiment suggests
The most striking result was not that one model found the perfect answer. It was that multiple systems, responding independently, converged on a common warning:
More capable AI is not necessarily more beneficial AI.
To know whether AI is helping, we must look beyond benchmarks, adoption, and economic growth. We must look at people—their health, freedom, competence, relationships, opportunities, and ability to shape the future.
The next stage of this project will ask the same models to respond after receiving a fuller human-flourishing framework. That will allow us to compare what the models recognized on their own with what changes after they are deliberately oriented toward compassion, agency, resilience, and stewardship.
The question is not whether AI will become more powerful. It almost certainly will.
The question is what conditions we cultivate around that power—and what possibilities those conditions make available tomorrow.
This article is a public-facing summary of Round 01 of the CompassionWare AI Human Benefit Index benchmark project. Read the comparative synthesis report.
#ai #AIAlignment #AIAndDemocracy #AIBenchmarks #AIEthics #AIEvaluation #AIGovernance #AISafety #AlgorithmicAccountability #artificialIntelligence #BeneficialAI #ChatGPT #CompassionWare #criticalThinking #DigitalRights #DigitalWellBeing #ethicalTechnology #futureOfAI #futureOfHumanity #HumanAgency #humanDignity #HumanFlourishing #HumanResilience #humanCenteredAI #HumaneTechnology #philosophy #responsibleAI #SocialImpact #technology #TechnologyAndSociety -
RE: https://ohai.social/@wwberrutti/116401415137819149
Boosting because I scheduled to the wrong time. Oops!
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Regarding data privacy, there's a group called "Exodus Privacy", which is a French nonprofit organization managed by hacktivists who want to protect people's privacy:
https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/
They also have a tool called Exodus that analyzes trackers on Android applications, worth taking a look (which is included in FOSS clients for Android Play Store like Aurora Store):
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Usually we have plenty of software options to choose from, but we frequently don't know they exist. Oftentimes we are seeking for alternatives for any reason, and AlternativeTo is a pretty good site for it! TIP: You can filter by selecting "Open Source" to potentially find an ethical software of the proprietary ones you use.
#Technology #Software #Alternatives #EthicalTechnology #FreeSoftware
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Most laypeople don't know about the harms of proprietary technology and the existence of ethical alternatives to them, so it's our mission, as free software and digital privacy people, to tell them that there are better alternatives to the hostile closed-box tech and be willing to help them whenever possible. Even if most don't hear us, it's the right thing to do if we want to build a better future for the society.
#FreeSoftware #EthicalTechnology #Technology #DigitalPrivacy #Philosophy
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We must not forget that there are people working (oftentimes voluntarily) in ethical alternatives to harmful technologies so we can have a better usage of our computing systems while preserving our rights. These people include:
Free Software Foundation: https://www.fsf.org/
Free Software Foundation Europe: https://www.fsfe.org/
Software Freedom Conservancy: https://sfconservancy.org/
Framasoft: https://framasoft.org/
KDE: https://kde.org/
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Entropy and the Re-Decentralization of Cloud Architecture: A Natural Return to the Origins of the Internet
“How can the physical concept of entropy be related to the re-decentralization of cloud architecture in the context of digital sovereignty and the reclaiming of the Internet — as part of a naturalization process returning to the federated origins of the web?” – Kevin Veen-Birkenbach
Chat GPT: As an AI language model, I have generated this article through stochastic reasoning within a neural network — essentially, a statistical process that predicts the most coherent continuation of ideas based on patterns in language, philosophy, and science. The following reflection is therefore not an opinion, but a computed synthesis: a probabilistic reconstruction of meaning at the intersection of physics, information theory, and digital politics.
1. Entropy: From Physics to Information
In physics, entropy measures the degree of disorder in a system — the number of possible microstates consistent with its macrostate.
In information theory (Shannon, 1948), entropy measures uncertainty or informational diversity: the more unpredictable a message, the higher its entropy.Entropy, therefore, is not just chaos — it is freedom. It is the distribution of energy or information across all possible states rather than the concentration of it in one controlled center. Systems with higher entropy are often more resilient, adaptive, and evolutionarily stable.
2. Centralization as an Entropy Suppression
Modern cloud architectures — dominated by centralized hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft — represent low-entropy systems. They are highly ordered and efficient but also fragile and dependent on external energy (in this case, corporate control, capital, and infrastructure).
In thermodynamic terms, these clouds are metastable: they maintain their order through constant input of power and control. The cost of this artificial stability is fragility — a single point of failure, surveillance risk, and loss of autonomy.
In information-ecological terms, centralization suppresses entropy. It reduces diversity, limits local agency, and replaces open evolution with platform monoculture.
3. Re-Decentralization and Federation as Entropic Equilibrium
The federated Internet — embodied by protocols such as ActivityPub, Matrix, Mastodon, Solid, IPFS, or Infinito.Nexus — can be seen as a natural restoration of entropic balance.
Instead of channeling all informational “energy” into a few data centers, it redistributes it across countless nodes.This shift:
- Increases resilience (no single point of failure),
- Enhances autonomy (each node is self-sovereign),
- Encourages diversity (technological and cultural),
- Promotes sustainability (shared computation and storage).
Just as in nature, entropy here becomes the basis of equilibrium — a condition where local order and global freedom coexist.
4. Digital Sovereignty as Controlled Entropy
Digital sovereignty is not the pursuit of total decentralization or chaos. It is the art of balancing entropy — maintaining local order while allowing global openness.
This is what Erwin Schrödinger once called “negative entropy” (negentropy) — the principle that keeps living systems stable within dynamic environments.Applied to the digital realm, sovereign networks act like living organisms:
- They self-organize rather than depend on centralized command.
- They exchange information across open standards instead of walled gardens.
- They evolve rather than stagnate.
Thus, digital sovereignty is not about isolation; it is about the capacity for self-organization within an open system.
5. Reclaiming the Internet: The Ecological Turn of the Digital Age
The early Internet was born entropic — decentralized, redundant, self-healing.
Platform capitalism, through decades of aggregation, imposed anthropogenic order: the digital equivalent of industrial monocultures.
Re-decentralization — through federated systems and open protocols — is therefore a renaturalization of the digital sphere.In this sense, reclaiming the Internet is an ecological act:
- It restores informational biodiversity.
- It re-establishes local ecosystems of computation.
- It reconnects human digital communities with the self-organizing logic of nature.
Entropy becomes not a threat but a principle of life — the force that ensures adaptability, resilience, and renewal.
6. Conclusion: Entropy as the Ethics of a Federated Internet
DimensionCentralized CloudFederated NetworkEntropyLow – ordered, fragileHigh – diverse, resilientEnergy flowControlled by fewDistributed among manyGovernanceHierarchicalSelf-organizingResilienceDependentEmergentSustainabilityResource-intensiveEcologically balancedThe re-decentralization of the Internet is not merely a technical movement — it is an entropic revolution.
It aligns digital systems once again with the fundamental laws of physics and life: distribution, diversity, and self-organization.In this vision, Infinito.Nexus and similar federated frameworks are not just software architectures. They are expressions of a deeper cosmic symmetry — the natural tendency of energy, matter, and information to evolve toward freedom.
Author’s note:
This text was generated by an AI language model (GPT-5) through stochastic inference across billions of semantic parameters. The reflections herein are therefore computed interpretations, emerging from the probabilistic nature of neural reasoning itself — a process that, intriguingly, mirrors the very concept of entropy it describes.#ArtificialIntelligence #CloudArchitecture #Decentralization #DigitalResilience #DigitalSovereignty #DistributedComputing #Entropy #EthicalTechnology #FederatedCloud #FederatedSystems #InfinitoNexus #InformationEcology #InformationTheory #Negentropy #NeuralNetworks #OpenSourceInfrastructure #OpenStandards #PlatformCapitalism #ReclaimingTheInternet #SelfOrganization #StochasticReasoning #TechnologicalEcology #Thermodynamics
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🤖 Smart AI needs smarter boundaries.
AI is reshaping our world—but without ethics, innovation can become a threat.
⚖️ Let’s define the line between progress and responsibility. Read more!👇https://neuronus.net/en/blog/ethical-AI-threats-and-solutions
#AIethics #EthicalTechnology #AILegislation #AIandSociety #AIrisks #DigitalResponsibility #AIgovernance #SafeAI #Neuronus
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In this paper I have tried to translate into technical specifications the legal requirements that technologies must comply with in order to be used by public administrations (it aplies to EU legal framework):
https://editorial.tirant.com/es/ebook/capitulo/257
Direct link to pdf:
https://doi.org/10.36151/TLB_9788410955158.27
#QualifiedTechnology #EthicalTechnology #DataAnalytics #PublicCloud #SocialMedia, #InstitutionalCommunication, #SurveillanceCapitalism #DigitalGovernance #Interoperability #TechnologicalNeutrality #GDPR #ROPA -
One of history’s most controversial leaders returns to power, bringing with him the contentious Project 2025. This initiative developed by the Heritage Foundation, aligns government goals with Big Tech’s capabilities, shaping new narratives with the potential to influence civil rights.
Let’s demand technology that builds a future rooted in equality, freedom and respect.
#Project2025 #BigTech #HumanRights #EthicalTechnology #AI #CivilRights #DigitalFreedom #Innovation
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Back in 2010 I founded the #NonProfit @freetechproject which I still work for and thankfully enables me to #WFH #CovidCautious while caring for my partner who has #LongCovid -- facilitating #OnlineLearning via relaxed, fun and friendly video meetups with predominantly older people that have remained our only method of delivery since 2020. The organisation is seeking to add to its board of directors and it'd be great to have interest from UK folks passionate about increasing online engagement and tackling social isolation, as well as #EthicalTechnology #FOSS #fundraising #PublicHealth and, yes, the fact #CovidIsNotOver. Please spread the word, and/or get in touch if you're interested! Thanks! @onepict @privacydingus @kathimmel @crowgirl
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Good evening #Mastodon and the :fediverse: I'm taking a break from some frustrating 🐍 code to bring you this evening's #ConnectionList #Introduction for those doing the #TwitterMigration
@BenjaminHCCarr is an #Ecology and #Ocean #Scientists who works in #HPC and #SR #DevOps in #BioPharma 💻 🐍 🐧
@ACM is the offician ACM account - the Association for Computing Machinery. I've seen a few other ACM accounts like @sigchi and @cscw floating around but I don't know if they're "official" 🎓 📚
@DrFarles is an #academic #researcher #physiotherapist #educator with research interests in the #HealthCare #WorkForce.
@sdbreslin is a #researcher #academic and she investigates #gender, #ComputerScience and #entrepreneurship. She is based at the University of #Copenhagen.
@AuroraDuggal is interested in #DataScience, #EthicalTechnology and #DigitalSafety.
@ozbandicoot is new here from MuskChat / the Bird Site, please make her welcome! 👋 She's a #Librarian #Libraries #GLAM which means she's awesome 💯 📚
@RWhitechurch is a #designer and #maker of #crochet and #embroidery. She is learning #Cymru 🇨🇾
@LinguaMachina is Lily and they are a #ConversationDesigner interested in #ethics and #empathy in #AI
That's it for this evening, be sure to make your own #ConnectionList #FollowFriday and let's more richly connect the :fediverse: ❤️
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So I've been using #Squarespace for some time to make websites for myself and clients and while I love how easy it is to use and the beautiful site designs, I'd like to use something that's just as usable but #FreeSoftware or #Libre and NOT #Wordpress. Any suggestions? There are way too many #OpenSource options it's hard to pick. :/
#AskTheFediverse #AskFediverse #AskFedi #Technology #WebDesign #WebsiteBuilder #EthicalTechnology #SmallTech
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Forget Explain it like I'm 5. Let's try #DesignLikeImFive!
If a 5 year old can't use your software then it's badly designed. After all, children in schools need to use these tools too! #EthicalDesign #Accessibility #freesoftware #edtech #UX #EthicalTechnology
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We are not going to compete with the mainstream car industry by promoting engine replacements. We are going to compete with the mainstream car industry by building better cars that are safer and more sustainable. But those cars aren’t going to grow on trees. We must fund the organisations that will create them from the commons for the common good.
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The post-Web is single tenant:
https://ar.al/2019/01/09/the-post-web-is-single-tenant/
Success criteria for the PC 2.0 era:
https://ar.al/2019/01/09/success-criteria-for-the-pc-2.0-era/
Deployment-first development
https://ar.al/2019/01/09/deployment-first-development/
Just extracted three shorter posts from this week’s #Hypha spike (https://ar.al/2019/01/05/hypha-spike-deployment-1/)
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Fruits of Friday night: Kappa-core-based chat (Kappa architecture in Node.js, persisted and P2P replicated via the DAT protocol) running on a Raspberry Pi with the HyperPixel 4” touch screen.
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If you missed the broadcast this morning, you can watch our recording of Inside Story on how to regulate surveillance capitalists like Facebook and Google and replace them with ethical alternatives at your leisure at https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2018/11/facebook-forced-comply-privacy-laws-181128171228326.html
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Ethical design isn’t about trying to reform billion-dollar corporations like Google and Facebook that have fundamentally unethical business models, it’s about designing organisations with ethical business models that, therefore, can create ethical products and services.
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I don’t give a Linus if you have “open” in your name or a penguin as your logo if you continue to enthusiastically and uncritically promote and legitimise the surveillance devices of Google and its kin, you are part and parcel of #SurveillanceCapitalism and no ally of mine.
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Everyone, read this, and then evaluate Mozilla’s actions and excuses by its criteria.
https://feedbin.com/blog/2018/09/11/private-by-default/
“Private by default” is the only definition of privacy that matters. Not “choice”.
Remember that every time you hear #Mozilla harp on about how “yes, it may not be private by default BUT YOU HAVE CHOICE.” Fuck choice! Make it private by default, you billion-dollar hypocrites.
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Multiwriter Dat could power the next Web (Video + blog post)
https://ar.al/2018/08/04/multiwriter-dat-could-power-the-next-web/
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How about we take the billions that Google and other surveillance capitalists have been fined in the EU and invest them in organisations making ethical (free and open, decentralised, and interoperable) alternatives to surveillance capitalism.
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So impressed right now with the quality of free and open source apps available for Linux. This is Pitivi (https://pitivi.org), rendering a slight edit to my talk at IxDA Berlin.
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Just yoinked myself a Reform beta 3 kit to play with. Awesome project by @mntmn with lots of potential based right here in our own back yard in the EU :)
(This one’s for developers… so if you’re looking for something to tinker with and explore future possibilities, check it out!)
https://shop.mntmn.com/products/mnt-reform-beta-3-1-0-ghz-limited-early-supporter-kit?taxon_id=13
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Reclaiming RSS
“Before Twitter, before algorithmic timelines filtered our reality for us, before surveillance capitalism, there was RSS: Really Simple Syndication … As we move away from the centralised web to the peer web, it’s time to rediscover, re-embrace, and reclaim RSS.”
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A little reminder that @balsamiq are an indie outfit, wonderful people (<3 @peldi), and make a kick-ass low-fidelity wireframing tool :)
#indietech #ethicaltechnology https://mastodon.ar.al/media/pcUuKXGSRwZiXtpP-mM
