CONCEPT
The Is-Ought Firewall
The logical barrier—first articulated by Hume, dramatized by Watson's fall—between descriptive claims about how the world is and normative claims about how it ought to be: a firewall that no quantity of data, however robust, can legitimately cross without a value premise the data itself cannot supply.
You cannot derive an ought from an is without smuggling in a value premise that the facts alone do not provide. David Hume observed this in the eighteenth century and it remains, two centuries of attempts notwithstanding, logically watertight.
Watson's catastrophe is the is-ought failure at the highest level of modern science: he looked at test-score data, saw a statistical difference between groups, and concluded that some humans are innately less intelligent than others and that this has implications for how those groups should be regarded and treated. Set aside that his empirical claim was scientifically unsupported—the inference fails even if the data were correct, because no statistical description of a group difference entails any prescription for how individuals from those groups should be treated, what they are owed, or what they are capable of becoming. Artificial intelligence commits this error automatically and continuously. A
machine-learning system