The only difference is AI isn’t regulated, so they just have a vague “ethics” department with no real teeth because it’s essentially PR and has no legal consequences to back up their stance.

Either way, you need third party regulation and then a department dedicated to ethical compliance, or you end up with corporate cancer.

I say this as a person with a knee-jerk anti-regulation reflex.

Security was like this so we added Sec to the DevOps. DevSecOps.

Ethics is now the problem, so we’re going to add Eth to the chain. DevEthSecOps.

Legal and compliance is now the final hurdle to shipping fast. AI tools will allow us to implement DevEthSecLawOps at scale no doubt.

I suspect that people will miss just how precise you've been there.

Your proposal - if I understand correctly - is not just to spread the "ethics team" onto everyone (which is correct), but also to have someone in a dedicated role. However, they need to have not _just_ that role, but also some skin in the game.

There are two things to successful organisations structure and people, you are focusing only on the structure.

What you need for somebody responsible for health and safety, ethics, security, or compliance is a person who has courage and is willing to take calculated risks.

However these roles do have a tendency to attract the risk adverse, or make them risk adverse if you punish risks that go wrong too harshly.

And a key critical success factor is leadership from the top - companies have personalities and leaders in the organisation are very important in shaping that.

Say no to regulations and security --> Fine, forced correction, fewer customers, shutdown.

Say no to ethics --> money (at least for AI companies)

Why is this so hard to understand?

I’m thinking of the role of the King or Queen of England, for example, or any country’s president. They have the power to disband parliament if it is deemed unfit for government, or reject a law that has been approved by the senate/Lords, yet in practice they are not expected to disagree with the ‘will of the people’ so to speak.

Same applies to the head of an ethics department on a business which is obviously unethical (or they wouldn’t need one).

Perhaps "ethics" is a more slippery slope, but the approach is well trodden.

It's a choice of company culture from leadership on whether the company acks the suggestions or ignores them. And when they get ignored or drive little impact for the cost, then teams disband. Which is also true for any team at any company.

What your describing is the specific case of a company so paralyzed by short-term thinking that they see regulation as a burden. Some maturity in the organization would allow reframing this to be less antagonistic.

That is only true where the pressure to be [the thing that is inconvenient to the other group] is not from a source that can cause massive problems if non-compliance is spotted. When the blocking group is legally mandated or otherwise really has teeth or is defending the company against an external regulator with teeth, then it works better (though obviously not perfectly). Think legal and compliance in banking realms, where the company significantly fined and the people breaking the rules could be sacked & blackballed (though sometimes not the people ordering them to break the rules!) when something bad is noticed. That is quite different to an ethics officer in a company like OpenAI where the position is basically there for PR purposes (“look plebs, we care about doing the right thing, honest, we got a manager with a small team dedicated to it” and “look [government body], we are regulating ourselves, do you really need to spend time looking too?”) and therefore has no real teeth directly or indirectly especially as fault for non-compliance might not be easy to attribute.

just ngmi