The Sense and Nonsense of AI Ethics: a Whistle Stop Tour

The Fearless Scholar

2026

Themes: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Category: Blog

AI research has been energised since the unveiling of AlphaGo in 2016 and ChatGPT in 2022, demonstrating capabilities well beyond public and even expert expectations. It also has acquired a chaperone, a growing cottage industry of AI ethics to describe, diagnose, and ultimately remedy its perceived potential harms. There is no legal demand to be ethical, and no-one can force you to be ethical, so there is a limit to the number of harms it can prevent. The result is a crowded field with a confusion of non-problems, non-serious problems, non-specific problems and the real deal.

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