Ethics is Not Just an Engineering Problem
The Cambrian explosion, which occurred roughly 500 million years ago, was an extraordinary global surge in biological diversity that gave rise to a vast array of complex multicellular life.
This rapid diversification was driven by converging factors: rising oxygen levels enabled the metabolic demands of more complex organisms, while the emergence of Hox genes provided the genetic framework for diverse body plans. Together, these advances fostered increasingly intricate predator-prey interactions, further accelerating evolutionary innovation.
Our hominid ancestors began using tools millions of years ago. While early tools were simple and undifferentiated, there was a rapid expansion in their variety between 300,000 and 50,000 years ago.
Between 300,000 and 50,000 years ago, human toolmaking underwent a dramatic transformation, marked by a rapid expansion in the diversity, specialization, and complexity of tools.
This surge in technological innovation was driven by converging factors: cognitive and neurological advances enabled greater planning, abstraction, and symbolic reasoning, while social and environmental pressures favored more efficient and specialized implements. As with biological systems, feedback loops—between innovation, transmission, and use—amplified the pace of diversification.
The Industrial Revolution, beginning in the late 18th century, marked a profound and rapid transformation in human production, marked by the mechanization of labor and the exponential growth of technological innovation.
This shift was enabled by a confluence of factors: advances in scientific understanding, access to concentrated energy sources such as coal and steam, and evolving economic institutions that supported investment and large-scale manufacturing. The interaction between technological invention, capital accumulation, and expanding markets created powerful feedback loops that accelerated industrial development and reshaped global societies.
The Intelligence Integration Revolution, now unfolding in the early 21st century, marks a transformative leap in human systems—characterized by the rapid convergence of artificial intelligence, robotics, networked devices, and biological interfaces into integrated, adaptive infrastructures.
This revolution is driven by intersecting forces: breakthroughs in machine learning and neural networks, dramatic increases in computational power and data availability, and the maturation of technologies that embed intelligence into physical and digital environments. As these systems begin to sense, decide, and act autonomously, they generate powerful feedback loops—reshaping labor, governance, coordination, and cognition at global scale. They also raise important ethical questions; questions that need to be addressed throughout the systems’ development lifecycles.
The system development lifecycle (SDLC) exists in many forms, and although an SDLC is tailored to the specific demands of the system and its environment, they all encompass similar phases, such as problem framing, design, implementation, deployment, and ongoing operation. Each phase must incorporate structured reflection on human impact, agency, and fairness. For example, while framing a problem, we need to ask: Whose values define the objective? Who benefits—or is excluded—by the solution space? Similarly, while designing a system, we need to ask: Does the architecture preserve human oversight, intelligibility, and recourse?
Every type of system will have unique ethical challenges. For example, AI systems need to consider ethics in the context of the source datasets (are they representative and consented?), and the model training process itself. Ethics cannot be bolted on, nor reduced to a series of compliance reviews. We need to infuse human-centered design into every aspect of each phase, advancing engineering as an ethical act to support human flourishing.
But technology is not ethically neutral; a system is built for a purpose, and within the context of the organization building the system—not just engineering, but every department comprising the organization in totality.
Ethical systems are rooted in how an organization understands its purpose, defines its values, and structures its work. Mission statements, design briefs, employee handbooks, and institutional norms all encode what is considered valuable, permissible, and worth building.
If the Intelligence Integration Revolution is to serve human dignity and agency, then ethics must be inculcated throughout every organizational level—not as a department or checklist, but as a shared orientation. This requires embedding ethical reflection into strategic goals. It requires structuring incentives to reward responsibility, and cultivating cultures that value attentiveness, humility, and relational accountability. Perhaps most importantly, everyone needs to see their work as morally consequential.
Every organization—including governments, non-profits, and for-profits—is shaping the future. Our future! Every act carries ethical weight. To successfully navigate this extraordinary era, we must ensure that organizations fully re-commit to their human responsibilities in the everyday choices that define what they build, how they build it, and for whom.