Thoughts on Ethics

You want to know if technology is good or bad?

Wrong question.

It's like asking if evolution is good. Evolution just is. It doesn't care about your moral framework. It moves forward, breaks things, builds new things on top of the wreckage. Technology is the same. It is a lever on what we already are: the brilliant parts and the broken parts and everything in between.

The real question: good compared to what?

The relative balance equation

Nothing exists in a vacuum. A technology that saves lives in one context destroys livelihoods in another. Social media connects billions and fractures attention spans. AI writes code faster than humans and floods the internet with slop. The same fire that cooks your food burns down the forest.

Wisdom is seeing a situation from multiple angles. It's knowing which comparisons matter. Mercury fillings caused harm, sure. Compared to cavities? Miracle. Social media spreads misinformation. Compared to cable news and talk radio? Not even close. In fact social media is the tool used to organize protests all around the world to fight the misinformation and propoganda that governments push onto respective societies.

The equation shifts with context. What's good today might be catastrophic tomorrow. The same river, never the same water. Heraclitus was right. So was the Buddha: everything changes, and attachment to any fixed answer (good or bad) creates suffering.

The brutal part nobody wants to hear

Technology encodes values whether we admit it or not. Every tool reshapes the user. Smartphones didn't just give us access to information. They rewired how we experience time, place, relationships, attention. We adapted to cars and trains and the printing press. We'll adapt to AI and social media too.

But adaptation has a cost. The cost is often invisible until it's too late. We're judging an infant technology (social media is 250 months old) based on what teenagers do with it, in one culture, during a specific historical moment. That's like evaluating the printing press in 1450 and calling it dangerous because it might spread heresy.

Still, some technologies make harm easier than good. Red flags exist such as: when a tool requires secrecy to develop, when it benefits a few at the expense of many, and when it extracts more than it creates. Progress is a negotiation between what we build and what builds us.

What we forget

The most important thing about a technology is what habits it creates. What it makes you notice. What it makes you ignore. How it changes your vision of a good life.

Candles gather. Electric lights banish. One harmonizes with darkness, the other conquers it. Neither is purely good or purely bad, but they train you to see the world differently. Most of us never think about this until it's already done.

The technological system exists to perpetuate itself. We modify our behavior to fit the system's needs: recycling, retraining, reshaping ourselves into better components. This is the fault of scale and complexity. The system is guided by technical necessity, not ideology.

And here's the uncomfortable part: we don't get to opt out. When a technology becomes widespread enough, not using it makes you uncompetitive. The Amish can refuse electricity, but the rest of us are on the grid whether we like it or not.

The only constant

Everything changes. That includes what's good.

Ethics is a dance between competing values in a specific context. The golden rule (do unto others) sounds simple until you realize your neighbor might want something different than you do. Absolute honesty, absolute love, absolute purity: beautiful ideals, impossible in practice. Real ethics is messy. It's 2 steps forward, 1 step back. The step back is course correction.

The only universal constant is that there is no universal constant. Even the claim "everything is relative" is itself an absolute truth. Nondual thinking in action. Good and bad are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other. If the white fish eats the black fish, the white fish disappears too.

Technology is the mirror. It shows us what we already are: brilliant, broken, capable of both creation and destruction. The question is whether we're wise enough to see what it's doing to us, and whether we're willing to adjust course before the damage becomes permanent or even to great to course correct from.

So what now?

Don't ask if something is good. Ask what it requires of you. What it requires of others. What it requires of the earth. Ask if you can live with the consequences. Ask if the world would be better or worse if everyone (or at least a large portion of the population) did it exactly the way you do (or are about to).

And then (this is the hard part) keep asking. Because the answer will change. The river is never the same twice.