Past Influences, Present Ethics: How History Shapes AI Decision-Making and Technological Futures

OpenAI’s release of products such as Chat-GPT, DALL-E, and Sora have recently triggered existential debates around artificial intelligence and its ultimate impact on humanity. While previous innovations seen as quite banal today have gone through similar panics – radios, televisions, microwaves and so on, the socio-economic environment surrounding the development of these digital innovations may cause warrant for these concerns. Through a historical analysis of the socio-economic environment developed during the financialization of the market in tandem with digital technology developments in the 1970s and onwards, this study places digital innovation entrepreneurs of today within the historical contexts which influence their ethical decision making. Guided by a discourse analysis via GloVe word embeddings, the ethical perspectives of Sam Altman and OpenAI are analyzed to gain a better understanding of how the path dependencies created in the late 20th century influence Big Tech leaders in their ethical decision making for the innovations which deeply impact our futures. The main take away is that what is defined as ethical varies between different academic lenses and for the industry. The differing perspectives between groups causes disagreement of what is ethical or not, the intention of Big Tech actors, how to address ethical issues within the tech, and the potential societal impact of these digital innovations. These disagreements cause misgivings between scholars of different backgrounds and those within the industry, with mistrust between groups over ethical approaches and decision making. Thanks to this multitude of varied interpretations and definitions, implementing ethical frameworks within digital technologies is complex. Consequently, the study concludes that a broader study is needed to see how to integrate ethics within the iterative innovation process of digital technology. Alignment of ethics between actors and scholars commenting, regulating, and involved in the digital innovation process is needed to do so. Therefore, a multidisciplinary study is advantageous to develop comprehensive solutional frameworks which can propose alignments which ensure that digital innovations fundamentally produce positive societal outcomes.