Several years ago, I was honored to be among the people asked to contribute a chapter to a new book: Next Generation Ethics: Building a Better Society. This book tackles the modern ethical challenges we face with an emphasis on ethics-related technology issues (AI, self-driving cars, etc.)
The editor, Ali Abbas, is a PhD graduate of Stanford in Decision Analysis, an electrical engineer, and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Public Policy in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Ali and I are colleagues in the decision analysis field.
Various people tackled ethical challenges in specific areas. I was asked to tackle ethics in the legal arena (I know, you're asking "Are there any??!!") Along with that, I presented a new hypothesis for making predictions about the ethics individuals and systems will follow: what if ethics is an evolved social behavior? If so, it would develop according to the advantages or disadvantages it creates for a species in it environment. Like any hypothesis, the question of whether it is true or not does not apply (only facts are true or false). If a hypothesis successfully makes useful predictions, we just use it till a better one comes along. One always does!
This is all in Chapter 23. You can find this book and all the others on my Amazon Author's Page. Now up to five books in total! (FYI: all proceeds go to the publisher. I was paid with "love!")
As a part of this experience, I had the honor of meeting some of the other authors, all of whom are more famous than I. Max Senges is a senior research scientist at Google, Eric Horvitz is at Microsoft Research Labs, Vint Cerf is presently at Google but also was "the father of the Internet" while at DARPA, and, of course, my mentor at Stanford Dr. Ron Howard. It has been a great learning experience and great for me to read through the other chapters in the book.
Now that it is out after years of effort, I'm hopeful we did something "arguably helpful!"
