By Thornton May

Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

There is a physical environment. There is a virtual or online environment. Surrounding these two now colliding worlds is a moral or ethical environment. This environment is constructed from the ideas which inform the choices we make. In the pre-modern age the focus of attention was on the physical environment. In the information age we have obsessed about the virtual environment. Moving forward, leaders are going to have to think hard about the ethical environment.

In a previous blog [http://goo.gl/Zqqai9] I posited four assumptions we can make about the Internet of Things [IoT]:
 

1. Everything will have a digital presence
2. Everything will be situationally aware
3. Most things will be remote controllable
4. The Self will be Quantified

The fact that billions of devices are on the cusp of “waking up” and talking to one another is a classic example of technology expanding the production possibility frontier [i.e., it lets us do more stuff]. Indeed, one might go so far to say that technology allows us to do ALL stuff. There is very little we cannot do. Our capability set [i.e., the things we can do] is expanding exponentially. Our ethical understandings [i.e., the things that we should and should not do] are not. We are playing a game of ethical catch-up.

Step One: Sketch the Poles Surrounding Aristotle’s “Golden Mean”
Despite the fact that just about any search on any search engine now returns millions of “hits” most modern day humans have pronounced Manichean tendencies [i.e., we tend to see things as either “black” or “white”]. I consistently rant against the false dichotomies which pervade contemporary conversations [e.g., “the Republicans are all bad” or “the future will be a battle of Team Privacy vs. Team Free Speech”]. The world of futuring has bifurcated between techno-optimists and techno-skeptics. The media showcases either the cheerleaders of progress at any cost or the prophets of doom who condemn change, bewailing all they envision which will be lost. Where is nuance? Where is the middle ground?

Step Two: Wrap Your head Around the Ur-Use Case – Personal Data
There was a time when total surveillance was technically impossible. Such data collection was the stuff of dystopic science fiction. Our world has become “device-ified”. Every year the average person generates approximately 1.8 million megabytes of personal data a year. That’s nine CD-ROMs EVERY day.

Truth be told, we don’t really understand how to “govern” this data. We have a vague understanding of the technologies associated with collecting and analyzing our data. But the ethics surrounding the question of what should be done with our data – that is the real issue.

There are different rights, values, and interests - indeed different philosophies - colliding. We do not know yet how to harmonise them.

In a simpler world we wrestled with the three “R”s [Reading, Writing and Arithmetic]. In the new world, the next world we will have to wrestle with the five “R”s:
 

1. Real Politik [what the bosses want us to do with the data]
2. Rights
3. Rules
4. Realities [Customer/Supplier info preferences]; and
5. Roles.

Perhaps Google was not so out there when they hired an ethics advisor.