AI Ethics Reading List

First DTES study results: 43% of 51 respondents named compassion as the top thing AI should learn from humans.

Wikipedia entry on the Three Laws of Robotics.

How "don't be evil" went from Google's motto to an abandoned principle that cost money and drove workers to organize.

Wikipedia entry on race-to-the-bottom dynamics — relevant to AI governance incentives.

China's 15th five-year plan — the benefits of centralized long-horizon planning for technology.

EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: the right to privacy has been enshrined as a fundamental human right since 2012.

Maslow Got It Wrong — Maslow himself never used the pyramid, which was based on a misunderstanding of the Siksika way of life.

IAPP AI Governance Professional certification.

The Black Mirror Writers Room exercise — using speculative fiction to teach ethical reasoning in CS education.

Anthropic research paper on AI emotions (April 2026) — ethical implications of affective states in LLMs.

Shannon Vallor's Technomoral Virtues — a foundational framework for virtue ethics in technology design.

Santa Clara University's guide to AI ethics literacy — from one of the leading university ethics programs.

SCU Framework for Ethical Decision Making — a practical, widely-used methodology.

SCU Internet Ethics resource hub.

SCU Technology Ethics program — applied frameworks for technology practitioners.

AI and Human Dignity — SCU Digital Dignity Day event materials.

Is Dignity a Bad Idea for AI Ethics? — responding to critics of dignity-based frameworks.

Using Ethics in Web Design (2018) — practical ethics in design that applies well to tech ethics generally.

TechnoMoral Futures UK — academic research programme on AI and moral futures.

Can AI Be Moral? The Quest for Moral Machines — TechnoMoral Futures research.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights — foundational document for AI ethics grounded in international law.

Transmutarianism working paper on Zenodo — a 27-page formal framework applying M = tF + A to qualitative governance problems.

Canada's new AI strategy is off to a bad start — the government reopened the consultation in response.

BetaKit summarized 348 pages of recommendations for Canada's next AI strategy.

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim on AI agents.

BC government funding for SRO housing — analyzed through the lens of the Economy of Wisdom framework.

OECD AI Policy Observatory — global AI policy tracker and principles.

Chatbots and Canada's AI governance gap.

KOSA online age verification: tensions between child safety, free speech, and privacy.

Anthropic drops its flagship safety pledge — analysis of what this signals.

Grok generated CSAM and Elon Musk seemed indifferent — the story gets worse with every detail.

Jensen Huang: engineers who don't use $250K of tokens will be replaced — the commodification of human technical skill.

Canada's official guide to responsible use of agentic AI in government.

NIST AI Risk Management Framework — the US federal standard for responsible AI.

The left should be thinking about not just universal basic income but also the terms of any AI bargain.

People's AI Consultation — protecting human judgement in the AI decision loop.

Open letter from the People's AI Consultation — shared at Ethics Lab Meetup #1.

While Canada consults, China released a five-year plan to seize the commanding heights of science and technology.

RightsCon 2026 statement — shocked and afraid are not sufficient words.

AI helped Shenzhen judges handle cases 50% faster — the future of algorithmic justice in China.

We're training students to write worse to prove they're not robots, and it's pushing them to use more AI.

OpenAI and Tumbler Ridge — an op-ed on AI's economic impact on resource communities.

How Grok nudification tool went viral on X — every new detail makes the story worse.

Ian Russell's fight for accountability from big tech after his daughter Molly's death — surveillance capitalism's human cost.

Bernie Sanders and AOC on data centres — local and global environmental impacts.

Pentagon designates Anthropic a supply chain risk — the AI safety standoff with the US military.

BC Ministry of Education AI in Education page — guidance on AI literacy for K-12.

WashBench — a benchmark showing that LLMs systematically soften harmful content during summarization. Safety fine-tuning causes model to downplay risks.

Working group: Preserving What Makes Us Human in the age of AI.

The 2026 International AI Safety Report — directly relevant to ethics discussions on systemic risk.

LLM Horrors — catalogue of real-world failures and harms from large language models.

Anthropic's new model spec — the principles guiding Claude's values and behavior.

"We cannot in good conscience accede to their request." — Dario Amodei on refusing a US government military contract.

One prompt can bypass every major LLM's safeguards — moral capital and debt accrue to whoever designs the rule.

Confirmation that pseudonyms and anonymised datasets no longer work. LLMs can unmask users at scale with surprising accuracy.

2026 TELUS AI Report.

Canada is lagging global peers in AI trust and literacy — KPMG report.

Seth Godin: AI ads are neither advertising nor AI — on authenticity and manipulation.

A counterpoint on the ongoing value of human programming skills in an AI-assisted world.

Meta AI Smart Glasses: workers say "we see everything." Omni-surveillance, make it fashion.

Malus — a project calculating the environmental and social cost of AI compute at scale.

Video resource on Technology Ethics shared by Morten Rand-Hendriksen.

AI tools that feel more like co-workers every month — what does that mean for human agency?

Video on AI and energy shared at Ethics Lab.

McGill University live stream on AI — 35% of the American stock market is 7 AI companies.

Talk on ethical technology practice — presented by a lab participant.

Video shared by a lab participant.

Podcast interview with Emad Mostaque (Stable Diffusion founder) on AI safety and social activism.

The Malus project — calculations on the true cost of AI compute.

Panel discussion on AI ethics at a BC + AI community event.

BC + AI community video on energy and AI.

Bernie Sanders' interview with Claude AI — focused on data protection and privacy.

Long-form video on AI — shared by a lab participant.

AI allows us to build a reverse surveillance state where citizens monitor government. A dashboard built by an agent swarm in under 24 hours.

Government accountability scorecard. The drop-downs are limited but the overall snapshots are useful.

Economy of Wisdom Foundation — explores the Wisdom Wallet concept and community AI pilots in the DTES.

512 — a byte-sized governance kernel for AI decision-making.

Curated book list on tech ethics and design from Morten Rand-Hendriksen.

CVS Sidecar — concrete implementation of a citation and evidence layer for AI outputs.

Open-source repo for the Transmutarianism framework site.

SCAB — a tool in the AI governance and accountability space.

Swarmloop — governance and impact varies across different mediums and contexts.

Transmutarianism — a philosophical and governance framework for post-scarcity economies and AI alignment.

Transmutarianism network — applying the Economy of Wisdom framework to community issues.

Applying the Economy of Wisdom framework to the TELUS data centre in Vancouver.

Lattice — an ethical AI framework explorer that helps teams compare and apply six major ethical AI frameworks without flattening the nuance.

WattsUp — tool for tracking and visualizing AI energy consumption.

Wolfpack — agent swarm that built the Big Eh Brother government accountability dashboard in under 24 hours.

Consumers can submit a complaint to Ad Standards. It's not perfect and most people don't know it exists.

Collage Strategy — design and facilitation firm.

Food for thought on human creativity and what AI can and cannot replicate.

Documentation from Ethics Lab Meetup #1.

Gemini runs ethical frameworks regardless of the agency level of the request — a demonstration of the limits of guardrails.

Using the ethics framework for a 10,000-foot flyover of a polarized political debate.

Gemini analysis of identity and creativity at Creative Mornings.

Inclusive Global Classrooms — facilitator resource shared at Ethics Lab Meetup #1.

Jesi Carson — Ethics Lab facilitator and civic engagement specialist.

Brilliant essay on AI slop, the bullshitification of information podcasting, and the AI content-industrial-complex.

Mental health apps are not regulated by professional oversight bodies the way human practitioners are.

Molly vs the Machines — a father seeking justice from social media and surveillance capitalism after his daughter's death.

AI CTRL — a radical paradigm shift in AI ethical alignment and existential governance. Open-source framework.

Participedia — open database of participatory democracy methods worldwide.

Brookings study on the cost of removing friction from children's digital experiences across fifty countries.

Gemini analysis shared by a lab participant.

Gemini on Herman Hollerith's electric tabulating system — historical parallels to today's AI automation.

Google AI mode summary of the Malus project calculations on AI compute costs.

Google AI mode analysis of AI video generation energy use.

If you make AI videos to pass time on a flight, you might end up using more energy than the flight itself.

Tactical Tech — civil society org working on data, technology, and political power.

Shared in the context of US tech policy and its downstream impact on Canadian AI governance.

AI Ethical Futures Lab notes on Notion — foundational ideas for the lab.

Guide for running AI meetups — a work in progress from the early days of the lab.

The reading list aggregated from links shared in the Ethics Lab chat.

BC + AI response to the federal AI task force — alignment with regional interests.

Documentation from Ethics Lab Meetup #1.

Vancouver Design Nerds — community of designers working on ethical technology.

Captured (audiobook) — less about AI being evil, more about the companies that create them and capture regulatory bodies.

Data centers and the Great Lakes — environmental impact of AI infrastructure on fresh water resources.

Democracy Exchange — a Toronto consortium working on AI and democratic participation.

AI journalist video shared by a lab participant.

Video shared by a lab participant.

The Departure — science fiction exploring AI and the future of humanity.

Instagram post shared by a lab participant.

On the temptation of becoming a well-paid AI minion.

Domestic hosted voluntary surveillance — marketed as a safety feature to find lost pets.

Short comparison between Claude's Constitution and nuclear semiotics.

Progress has pros and cons — promoting AI ethics conversation on Vancouver Island.

Fedi Collective Vancouver meetup — community building in the ethical tech space.

Guardrails are not ethics — they are what you put up when you don't have ethics.

AI ethics session with students — reflections and photos.

Alex Bores on AI ethics and political accountability.

Domain registrar information.

If you measure total deprivation of privacy — a leading human need — Google's cost to society becomes enormous.

Open Source Contributor Compensation Standard — relevant to the AI conversation around labor and open-source.

Thread shared by a lab participant.

Donate to cover snacks and refreshments at free BC + AI community events.

Mrinank Sharma (Anthropic) on AI safety research.