Quotes About Ethics

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.

A movie like 'Transcendence' may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ.

The problem is that the same technological tools we use to thwart terrorists can also be used against the people whose job it is to stop them.

The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn't want to.

Ten thousand pounds is the legal value of a negligently taken life, of a child or a parent. A cold and somewhat mean-spirited calculation: you would do better if you slipped on a paving-stone and broke a front tooth.

I'm Jewish. I've always had a thing where it's okay to dance with the devil, just don't become the devil. Even at my peak, I never went too over the top.

The real problem in Mississippi is almost a complete moral breakdown. In order to move Mississippi from the bottom to the top, all we have to do is just get people to do a little more what they know, to practice a little more of what they preach.

There are numerous bugbears in the profession of a politician. First, ordinary life suffers. Second, there are many temptations to ruin you and those around you. And I suppose third, and this is rarely discussed, people at the top generally have no friends.

I like being part of a film scene where the person at the top is a really good person.

I want to get to the top. I want to be the best. But I want to do it the right way and to enjoy the whole deal.

Robots... I think that is a hot topic.

I know better than to ever attempt to get a reporter removed from covering any topic. That would never be an option.

There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that's important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.

Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI - if not the most.

One of the great things about the sci-fi genre is that you can kind of get away with a bit more when talking politics, making social references or dealing with very hot-button topics because it is sci-fi.

What's the big deal in doing a topless shoot provided it's done in good taste? Our temples too have topless figures carved on them.

He who could have been a torch and stoops to being a pair of jaws is a deserter.

The Tories have long since abdicated any pretension of principled global leadership.

The Tories claim that they have changed. Their stance on foxhunting makes it absolutely clear that they haven't. They know the public doesn't agree with them. They know that this is about animal cruelty, pure and simple.

I think doctors are really suffering now. They're suffering in the sense that they feel torn between serving their patients in the best way they can and dealing with all of requirements of the insurance companies and the HMOs and the hassles and the paper work and the increasing pressures to do less and less for their patients.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

The situation around Terri Schiavo was a deeply held conflict over what to do if someone isn't going to return to consciousness or competence. Who will decide? Even there, where we had settled legal rules, we still had disagreement. We're torn about these things.

People downloading my stories from the bit torrent sites were never going to buy them anyway. It's no money out of my pocket.

Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of 'experiments' banned long ago. This is a misrepresentation. The work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and humility. I have never seen an animal suffer pain.