One objection to conventional AI ethics is that it slows innovation. This presentation responds by reconfiguring ethics as an innovation accelerator. The critical elements develop from a contrast between Stability AI's Diffusion and OpenAI's Dall-E. By analyzing the divergent values underlying their opposed strategies for development and deployment, five conceptions are identified as common to acceleration ethics. Uncertainty is understood as positive and encouraging, rather than discouraging. Innovation is conceived as intrinsically valuable, instead of worthwhile only as mediated by social effects. AI problems are solved by more AI, not less. Permissions and restrictions governing AI emerge from a decentralized process, instead of a unified authority. The work of ethics is embedded in AI development and application, instead of functioning from outside. Together, these attitudes and practices remake ethics as provoking rather than restraining artificial intelligence.

Digital technologies for learning, health, politics, and commerce have enriched the world. Digital heroes like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Batya Friedman, Alan Kay, JCR Licklider, and Joe Weizenbaum have blazed trails. We depend upon software that nobody totally understands. We are vulnerable to cyberterrorism. Privacy is overrun by surveillance capitalism.7 Totalitarian control advances. Daily Internet news matching our beliefs makes it difficult to tell true from false.

Public concern about computer ethics and worry about the social impacts of computing has fomented the "techlash." Newspaper headlines describe company data scandals and breaches; the ways that communication platforms promote social division and radicalization; government surveillance using systems developed by private industry; machine learning algorithms that reify entrenched racism, sexism, cisnormativity, ablism, and homophobia; and mounting concerns about the environmental impact of computing resources. How can we change the field of computing so that ethics is as central a concern as growth, efficiency, and innovation? There is no one intervention to change an entire field: instead, broad change will take a combination of guidelines, governance, and advocacy. None is easy and each raises complex questions, but each approach represents a tool for building an ethical culture of computing.

We are rapidly approaching the day when an autonomous artificial intelligence may have to make ethical decisions of great magnitude without human supervision. The question that we must answer is how it should act when life is on the line. Helping us make our decision is philosopher James H. Moor, one of the first philosophers to make significant inroads into computer ethics. In his 2009 essay Four Kinds of Ethical Robots, he examines the possible ethical responsibilities machines could have and how we ought to think about it. Each group has different ethical abilities that we need to account for when designing and responding to them.

Published in the June 2000 issue of Computers and Society.