Moor on ethics for emerging technologies: Some environmental considerations

Around the turn of this century a number of emerging technologies were in the news, raising some potentially significant ethical questions. Given that they were emerging they as yet had no, or very few, impacts, so it was not obvious how best to assess them ethically. Jim Moor addressed this issue and offered three suggestions for a better ethics for emerging technologies. His first was that ethics should be dynamic, that is, it should be an ongoing process before, during and after the technological development. Second, there should be close collaboration between the researchers and developers on the one hand, and ethicists and social scientists on the other. Finally, ethical analyses should be more sophisticated. In this paper I argue that environmental issues and the questioning of core ethical values should be a central part of the ethics of emerging technologies, using AI examples. Given the kind of beings that we are, technology and the environment are closely connected for human flourishing.