MISSION
Ethical Tech Washington is an organization dedicated to incentivizing an innovative, fair, competitive, and sustainable economy in Washington and the world. We promote the creation of technology in a manner consistent with human thriving.
VISION
We envision a Washington where the companies that do well are the ones playing by the rules and leaving the world a better place. A Washington where our economy is grounded in a sense of place, with broad prosperity, built on an engine of innovation and creativity. A Washington that is beautiful, verdant, and has thriving communities for generations to come.
VALUES
We value local, in-person relationship. Life is about connection, not extraction.
We build systems where ethical behavior is rewarded. Scams, cheating, bullying, and grifting are not tolerated.
We advocate for policy that values people’s work and contributions. Art, language, and human thinking are valued, not stolen.
PURPOSE
We fulfill our mission by driving change to policy through research, education, leadership, and coalition.
AI
From a moral perspective, we believe that each person has the ability to create, to build, to connect in ways that are not replaceable by machines. We have lived in an economy built on manipulation, tapping into our core instinctual drives to engage and excite us at every moment. In this age of Large Language Models (LLMs), we must not believe the marketing that tells us that soulless, polished output is better than an inspired idea.
From a policy perspective, we propose two key questions to guide our work:
1) What decisions do we want AI to make?
2) Who will be responsible for those decisions?
When you ask an LLM to make a decision, how is this moral judgement determined? Whose morality is it? What is it optimizing for?
LLMs are trained on as much data as possible, then refined through reinforcement. Both of these encode moral judgement and thus are a reflection of the data and training they have received. We know that LLMs encode the same biases as the data sets they start from, and that the reinforcement learning may not align with the judgement and values of the organization using the LLM. AI companies are optimized for engagement and usage, the things that make the companies the most money.
When these LLMs imperfectly simulate the morality of organizations or societies of human beings, with no intervening oversight, it is a huge risk to all of us.
We need to legislate this responsibility and these rules in a way that protects us. For example, in alignment with the German court, corporations must be liable for the output of their LLMs and the consequences of that output on the people receiving it.
We will not defer our judgment, our creativity, our souls to a computer program trained on our work. We will not defer our humanity in service to the ever-rising stock prices of the largest corporations and their billionaire owners.
