i've seen the first four minutes of this video and it's already very bad. i genuinely want to engage with quantum workers who care about this, so i'm gonna do so honestly. https://twitter.com/QuantumDaily/status/1356323168496078848

beginning a video about ethics with (at least) four minutes of talking about how good and "revolutionizing" quantum computers are going to be is a massive and inappropriate bias.

talking exclusively to people who make their living off of researching and developing quantum technology is inappropriate. conflicts of interest are real & widely accepted parts of *many* ethical practices for good reason.

contrasting the social problems we have with tech with the 2008 financial crisis is a strange move, because it separates the causes of these two things. in reality, techno-capitalism is connected to both. this shows a lot about what criticisms are legitimate in this video.

around the eight minute mark we have an implication that quantum computers could be used for spying by government, maybe even for weapons. Wisby finally asks whether we should build this tech. that's cool, hope this thread continues

hmm the next minute is about AI ethics. Wattleton talks about discrimination in facial recognition, followed by Khan talking about democratizing access to the tech. the idea that facial recognition is *inherently* a tool for power & surveillance is not present.

if you buy that facial recognition is fundamentally a surveillance technology, even a little bit, the question of whether or not it should exist *at all* shoots to the top of the list.

now @nick_farina imagines that quantum computing was always funded by rich hedge fund managers, and how we would never cure cancer. QC is already *hugely* supported by rich hedge fund managers, with immediate applications being making rich people richer.

i get that this is a call to action, but why not suggest immediately the action that we completely cut finance applications? these are things which will *directly* worsen inequality in our world, which Khan specifically says he doesn't want the tech to do.

Khan also asserts that when people speak to each other, they are at root processing information, implying that quantum computers may some day be able to ... speak to us? sort of ignoring studies of cultural discourse & meaning making & communications

so interesting that Wisby points to the mental breakdowns that scientists had after creating the atom bomb, suggesting something would have been different had we been "thinking about those full ethical challenges from the beginning." what would have been different?

there was one scientist named Rotblat who started working on the Manhattan project believing that it was an ethical imperative to stop Germany. he left shortly thereafter believing it was ethically terrible to be building this thing at all.

but there are others who supplied ethical reasoning in support of the bomb, notably those who continued working on it and H-bombs long long after we knew the consequences.

the word "ethics" has so many problems and this is one of them: there are a million different systems of ethics. a lot of them fucking suck. the US military has systems of ethics. it's not enough to do ethics, think ethics, discuss ethics. we have to work under specific ethics.

me, for instance, i believe that war is bad and the US military's devastating imperialism must be stopped. that's an ethical imperative grounded in ethical systems involving care and respect for the dignity of human life & its relations.

the US military's ethics includes believing that facial recognition in drones shouldn't be racially biased---never mind the racism that's underlying its wars in the first place.

you gotta pick specific ethics.

Martinis brings up a problem in doing QC ethics: quantum knowledge is highly involved, takes a lot of training to get up to speed.

i agree and would add that so is analysing the social, environmental, economic, and political impacts of a technology.

Wisby says ethics is all about the discussions. it's not, though. talking is really important, yes. without action, though, there are no ethics. talking is not action.

see: the Having Conversations Industrial Complex. https://jezebel.com/the-emptiness-and-inertia-of-having-conversations-1844376876

also, talking about doing ethics *while doing activity implicated in the ethical questions* is a weird vibe for research ethics. not that it's the best model, but social science activities aren't even allowed to advertise their study before they get ethics approval.

if we really care about doing quantum computing ethically, why don't we stop? wait a little? figure some stuff out?

Khan finishes the video by imploring someone (us? the viewer? researchers? CEOs? really unclear) to think about the impacts of a quantum computing society, to not be asleep at the wheel again.

cool, glad you want that. let's talk about quantum computers being designed to further the storage and potential use of world-destroying nuclear weapons. and the US Air Force being the primary sponsor of the largest quantum business conference.

next time I hear someone talk about the risks of this technology, I want to hear what they mean. otherwise, they are *actively* creating a path where we can talk about "ethics" without talking about what ethics is made of: specific exploitation and devastation of people.

i could go on (like, the production style of this video deserves a whole nother thread-essay) but that's enough from me for now.

happy to chat about this.

couple refs:
re: QC & nukes, @RyanFMandelbaum's https://gizmodo.com/how-do-we-know-the-nukes-still-work-1837106578
the quantum-business conf: https://q2b20.qcware.com/ 
Hagendorff's ethics of AI ethics (ie. AI ethics is not right now a good model): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-020-09517-8#change-history
and there's *lots* to read about ethics of care.