Thesis 79

Technical measures intended to secure our prerogatives may ignite an arms race or otherwise muddy the issue.

However clever the Georgia Tech system was as a proof of conceptand it made for an impressive demothere were factors it was not able to account for. For example, it could not prevent photographers using digital SLR cameras (or, indeed, conventional, film-based cameras of any kind) from acquiring images. This was immediately pointed out by optics-savvy members of the audience and openly acknowledged by the designers.

If you were among those in the audience that day in Tokyo, you might have noticed that the discussion took a 90-degree turn at that point. It became one of measures and countermeasures, gambits and responses, ways to game the system and ways to bolster its effectiveness. Thirty seconds after the last echo of applause had faded from the room, we were already into the opening moments of a classic arms race.

This may well be how evolution works, but it has the unfortunate effect of accommodating instead of challenging the idea that, for example, someone has the right to take your image, on your property, without your knowledge or consent. It's a reframing of the discussion on ground that is potentially inimical to our concerns.

Admittedly, this was a presentation of a prototype system at an academic technology conference, not an Oxford Union debate on the ethics of image and representation in late capitalism. But isn't that just the point? Once we've made the decision to rely on an ecology of tools for our protectiontools made on our behalf, by those with the necessary technical expertisewe've let the chance to assert our own prerogatives slip away. An ethics will inevitably be inscribed in the design of such tools, but it needn't be ours or anything we'd even remotely consider endorsing. And once the initiative slips from our grasp, it's not likely to be returned to us for a very long time.

We know, too, that such coevolutionary spirals tend to stretch on without end. There's rarely, if ever, a permanent technical solution in cases like this: There are always bigger guns and thicker grades of armor, more insidious viruses and more effective security patches.

From my point of view, then, technical solutions to ethical challenges are themselves problematic. I'm not suggesting that we do without them entirely. I'm saying, rather, that technical measures and ethical guidelines ought to be seen as complementary strategies, most effective when brought to bear on the problem of everyware together. And that where we do adopt technical means to address the social, political, and psychological challenges of ubiquitous technology, that adoption must be understood by all to be without prejudice to the exercise of our ethical prerogatives.