Ethics

Socratic Bot

This is a follow-up from my earlier post.

This is really entertaining. It is also depressingly addictive. Self-indulging as well: what a luxury it is to be able to engage in a polite, seemingly rationale discussion with s̶o̶m̶e̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶ something that can reply almost instantly to each point, yet can wait with an infinite patience for my responses.

It also is a great support for fictional Socratic dialogues(*) - a very effective medium to convey philosophical ideas by guiding a student to reach the conclusion through their own reasoning. I used it with ChatGPT to talk about “regulatory narrow focus” which is an issue I have been looking in for a very long time.

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Ethic Questions

Linkedin, Digital Health and Ethics

The development of self driving cars has shine a bright light on the tramway challenge, which has reached meme status.

The digital health revolution is no different and has created gazillions of ethical challenges. You can call that a goldmine of ethic questions, if you like your glass half-full or are a professional ethicist. Or you can call it a minefield, if you are an entrepreneur in health tech, or an investor backing such a venture. Ethics-wise, healthtech does not play in the same league as another regulated industry, miltech. The concepts of risk and benefits are used in both leagues, but with meanings that are not compatible. Health tech does not play either in the same league as “plain” tech (aka YC). The concepts of risk and benefits most of the time share now compatible definitions, i.e. use roughly the same axes to describe their space of operations. But still, the benchmarks and values measured alongside these axes differ widely.

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