# If we do not rapidly make our systems ethical we are doomed. Let's work toward several practical applications of the ERT (Ethical Regulator Theory) at various scales and in various sectors. I (Marc) will focus on neighborhoods. Maybe Kerry will focus on institutions of one type or another. Maybe Olaf will focus on banks. ERT praxis.
I will label my focus, "Practical Neighborhood Ethics" or PNE.
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Perhaps, a non-profit organization without any conflicts of interests could define appropriate standards and start an open source ethics coding project for the laws, regulations, and rules that are most urgently required by the ethically adequate systems that we try to construct. See page 13 of 35 in paper referenced below.
Effectiveness without Ethics is societal and planetary suicide. We are far down that path already! Here is an actionable life line. Study it. After some study play with this: Ethical Regulator Design exercise.
Ethical Regulators and Super-Ethical Systems by Mick Ashby W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive, London, UK Cybernetics Society, London W5 2NQ, UK American Society for Cybernetics, Washington, DC 20052, USA Systems 2020, 8(4), 53; https://doi.org/10.3390/systems8040053
# Ethical Regulator Theorem Universality Anyone who has the impression that ERT primarily applies to artificial intelligence, robots, self-driving vehicles, and autonomous weapons systems is urged to consider how the theorem can be applied to human systems that make decisions that affect people or the environment, such as organizations, corporations, education systems, government institutions, CEOs, or yourself.
Justice Stevens [13] provided an excellent example of identifying the ethical inadequacy of the “Citizens United” ruling: “The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.”, which implies that there is a pressing need to evaluate the ethical adequacy of the entire U.S. Supreme Court system.
Since the ethical regulator theorem can be applied to any system that is required to make ethical decisions, the nine ERT dimensions define a domain-independent abstraction layer that can be used to map between any regulated systems. This creates a vocabulary, or isomorphism, that allows practitioners in one domain to communicate meaningfully with practitioners in seemingly unrelated domains, and share insights and solutions, for example, across artificial intelligence, corporate governance, education systems, and designing consumer products.
Specialists in each domain can share their challenges and solutions to improving purpose, truth, variety, predictability, intelligence/strategy, influence, ethics, integrity, and transparency. For example, perhaps a cloud-based secure audit trail service that was developed for one specific domain can be used to help solve transparency and integrity in completely unrelated domains.