Ethics
An annotated collection of 8 books, papers & essays on ethics, spanning 1976 to 2026. Featuring works by Joseph Weizenbaum, Roman Krznaric, Sherry Turkle and 5 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation
The man who built the first convincing chatbot spent the rest of his life warning us not to be fooled by it. Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966) faked a therapist with a few pattern-matching rules, and he was horrified to watch pe…
Empathy and the Art of Living
Krznaric writes about empathy as a civic virtue rather than a psychological faculty — as a practice that changes how societies treat strangers, how institutions design services, and how workplaces organise. This early es…
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
This is Turkle's turn from optimism to alarm. Having spent earlier books celebrating the computer as an evocative object for exploring the self, she spends this one documenting, through years of fieldwork with sociable r…
Weapons of Math Destruction
O'Neil, a mathematician who moved from academia to Wall Street to data science, identifies a class of predictive models she calls Weapons of Math Destruction: opaque, unregulated, and operating at scale in domains where…
Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
A catalogue of how the assumptions, demographics, and blind spots of design teams crystallise into products that harm the people they claim to serve — from name-validation forms that reject non-Western characters to algo…
Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
Cowen's philosophical argument that sustained economic growth — broadly defined to include environmental quality, leisure, and human capabilities — is a moral imperative because it is the only reliable mechanism for impr…
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜
This is the paper that gave the era its metaphor. A large language model, the authors argue, is a "stochastic parrot": a system that recombines linguistic form from its training data according to probabilistic patterns,…
Who Gets Flagged? The Pluralistic Evaluation Gap in AI Content Watermarking
Watermarking is positioned as neutral infrastructure for AI content authentication, but Nemecek et al. reveal how its effectiveness varies systematically across cultural and demographic lines — what they term the 'plural…