Originally written in 2007.

Marvin Minsky in an interview with Danielle Egan for New Scientist:

Minsky: The reason we have politicians is to prevent bad things from happening. It doesn’t make sense to ask a scientist to worry about the bad effects of their discoveries, because they’re no better at that than anyone else. Scientists are not particularly good at social policy.

Egan: But shouldn’t they have an ethical responsibility for their inventions

Minsky: No they shouldn’t have an ethical responsibility for their inventions. They should be able to do what they want. You shouldn’t have to ask them to have the same values as other people. Because then you won’t get them. They’ll make stupid decisions and not work on important things, because they see possible dangers. What you need is a separation of powers. It doesn’t make any sense to have the same person do both.

The Singularity Institute was recently asked to comment on this interview - which by the time it made it through the editors at New Scientist, contained just the unvarnished quote “Scientists shouldn’t have an ethical responsibility for their inventions. They should be able to do what they want. You shouldn’t have to ask them to have the same values as other people.” Nice one, New Scientist. Thanks to Egan for providing the original interview text.

This makes an interesting contrast with what I said in my “Cognitive biases” chapter for Bostrom’s Global Catastrophic Risks:

Someone on the physics-disaster committee should know what the term “existential risk” means; should possess whatever skills the field of existential risk management has accumulated or borrowed. For maximum safety, that person should also be a physicist. The domain-specific expertise and the expertise pertaining to existential risks should combine in one person. I am skeptical that a scholar of heuristics and biases, unable to read physics equations, could check the work of physicists who knew nothing of heuristics and biases.

Should ethicists be inside or outside a profession?

It seems to me that trying to separate ethics and engineering is like trying to separate the crafting of paintings into two independent specialties: a profession that’s in charge of pushing a paintbrush over a canvas, and a profession that’s in charge of artistic beauty but knows nothing about paint or optics.

The view of ethics as a separate profession is part of ...

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