Values Aren’t a Moral Imperative

The School for Moral Ambition

Moral ambition redefines success: not by what we accumulate, but by what we contribute. Build a legacy that truly matters. Join the movement.

Liberals Are Preaching Moral Values. What Took Them So Long?

Until recently, the language of morality belonged to social conservatives. But the history of liberalism suggests that values have been at its core all along.

Value engineering

Value engineering (VE) is a systematic analysis of the functions of various components and materials to lower the cost of goods, products and services with a tolerable loss of performance or functionality. Value, as defined, is the ratio of function to cost. Value can therefore be manipulated by either improving the function or reducing the cost. It is a primary tenet of value engineering that basic functions be preserved and not be reduced as a consequence of pursuing value improvements. The term "value management" is sometimes used as a synonym of "value engineering", and both promote the planning and delivery of projects with improved performance.

Large-scale harms to AI moral patients: a typology of risk factors

If AI moral patients are mass-produced, then then they will face risks of large-scale harms. This post outlines some factors that could contribute to such risks.

AI language model rivals expert ethicist in perceived moral expertise

People view AI as possessing expertise across various fields, but the perceived quality of AI-generated moral expertise remains uncertain. Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) perform well on tasks designed to assess moral alignment, reflecting moral judgments with relatively high accuracy. As LLMs are increasingly employed in decision-making roles, there is a growing expectation for them to offer not just aligned judgments but also demonstrate sound moral reasoning. Here, we advance work on the Moral Turing Test and find that Americans rate ethical advice from GPT-4o as slightly more moral, trustworthy, thoughtful, and correct than that of the popular New York Times advice column, The Ethicist. Participants perceived GPT models as surpassing both a representative sample of Americans and a renowned ethicist in delivering moral justifications and advice, suggesting that people may increasingly view LLM outputs as viable sources of moral expertise. This work suggests that people might see LLMs as valuable complements to human expertise in moral guidance and decision-making. It also underscores the importance of carefully programming ethical guidelines in LLMs, considering their potential to influence users’ moral reasoning.

On being valued - Emelia’s Ramblings

What does it mean to be valued, have I found the right room?

values based software talks

Talk #3 Files, algorithms, media, software as lived practice, and personal software

Please Don’t Take Moral Advice from ChatGPT

Before turning to a large language model for ethical counsel, consider what makes for good advice

Values in the Wild: Discovering and Analyzing Values in Real-World Language Model Interactions

AI assistants can impart value judgments that shape people's decisions and worldviews, yet little is known empirically about what values these systems rely on in practice. To address this, we develop a bottom-up, privacy-preserving method to extract the values (normative considerations stated or demonstrated in model responses) that Claude 3 and 3.5 models exhibit in hundreds of thousands of real-world interactions. We empirically discover and taxonomize 3,307 AI values and study how they vary by context. We find that Claude expresses many practical and epistemic values, and typically supports prosocial human values while resisting values like "moral nihilism". While some values appear consistently across contexts (e.g. "transparency"), many are more specialized and context-dependent, reflecting the diversity of human interlocutors and their varied contexts. For example, "harm prevention" emerges when Claude resists users, "historical accuracy" when responding to queries about controversial events, "healthy boundaries" when asked for relationship advice, and "human agency" in technology ethics discussions. By providing the first large-scale empirical mapping of AI values in deployment, our work creates a foundation for more grounded evaluation and design of values in AI systems.

Reading Ethics: Professional Development

Ethical Development Reading List DRAFT Aim of this list –               First, organization of the list according to rank/training and is…

Visualize Value — Ideas, made visible

An ongoing practice of turning ideas into images. Visual ideas about work, markets, technology, culture, and human behavior by Jack Butcher.

CMV: The labor theory of value is flawed

72 votes, 407 comments. This might be an obscure topic, however, in some—largely Marxist circles— the approach seems to motivate much of the dialogue…

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every ...