CONCEPT
The Intelligence Ecosystem Ethic
Leopold’s land ethic enlarged to include the web of human practitioners, data commons, AI systems, and institutional practices that constitutes the environment in which thinking now happens—holding that a practice is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of this community, and wrong when it tends otherwise.
The intelligence ecosystem ethic is the extension of Leopold’s land ethic to the contemporary landscape of AI-mediated knowledge work. Just as Leopold argued that the circle of ethical concern must expand from human beings to include soils, waters, plants, and animals—because the health of the human community is inseparable from the health of the biotic community that supports it—the intelligence ecosystem ethic holds that the circle must now expand to include the entire web of relationships that constitutes the environment in which intelligence operates. This web includes the AI systems, the data commons that feeds them, the institutional practices that shape how humans and machines interact, and the children who will inherit whatever version of this ecosystem the present generation builds or allows to degrade. The structural parallels between biotic communities and intelligence communities are precise: knowledge flows through the circuit as energy flows
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