What can happen when ethics takes centre stage in progress and development?

Saying that there is no talk about ethics when it comes to technology and economic development would of course be false. There are moral codes of conduct in most domains and organizations. Law is the most obvious attempt to encode ethics into national and international governance. Then we have culturally accepted norms of what constitutes good and bad behaviour. And then also domain-specific things like medical ethics, movements against animal testing of cosmetics, innovations for sustainable economies, codes of conduct inside organizations, and all the way down to individuals' moral fibre. All is not bad. Far from it.

There is a huge but coming. Actually, two.

There are obvious reasons to say that the way ethics is currently integrated into our cultures, societies and economies is grossly inadequate. We could point fingers at things like violations of international law by the most powerful states on the planet or animal cruelty in industrial farming. But direct unethical behaviours like these are only the tip of the iceberg. Much more toxic is the unethical behaviour that happens within the confines of the law and that slowly becomes so normalized that most people won't even see there being anything wrong with it. Specifically, we're talking about two types of issues here:

1. What kind of behaviour is being incentivized by the economic system and gets reinforced through selection in the competitive economic and geopolitical landscape, eventually becoming a normalized part of culture?

2. The inadequacy of governance mechanisms and technology development processes, where regulation only happens when the damage is already done.

We'll address those two respectively before going into what ethical progress might look like.

Economic incentives and competitive selection

The question is what kind of behaviour (of firms or individuals) gets rewarded and succeeds in the capitalist economy and in international competitive geopolitics. This is important because those with a lot of economic power get to disproportionally influence media, culturally accepted norms of behaviour and also law. Many like to say that the world is being run by corrupt politicians and greedy billionaires - but the fact that they are in positions of power means that psychopathic personality traits get most strongly selected for by the economic and political systems. Those in power have the most influence on designing the system, but in turn the system defines what kind of people get to the positions of power.

Thus, we cannot think of frameworks such as the law or moral codes of conduct as these strong fortresses ensuring that "wrong" behaviour is punished. Laws get changed - often in favour of those with the most capacity to lobby, i.e. with the most money. Cultural norms and mass behaviour also get changed - today with global media giants this is easier and quicker than ever. Again, often in favour of those with the most capacity to launch media narratives and design social media algorithms, i.e. with the most money. The behaviour that makes one economically or politically most successful will slowly become the normalized behaviour in the society.

Let's look at two of the many examples of normalized unethical behaviour:

1. Success on social media (in terms of attention received) is maximized by publishing the most addictive content and content that offers quick emotional satisfaction instead of depth. Even though it's now widely known and undisputed that psychological effects of this are terrible, especially for children, most participate in it. Marketing approaches such as FOMO are a standard practice. People and firms go along with socially destructive trends because otherwise they fall behind - "everyone is on TikTok now, we ought to get on there too". All of this is leading to an epidemic of mental illness and a drastic decline in cognitive ability, but fighting for attention on social media is considered completely normal. Even though many frown upon it, at some point most will shrug their shoulders, silence their ethical inner voice and accept it as the way life works now.

2. Industrial animal farming is probably one of the cruelest industrial ventures humanity has ever created. There's no need to get into the details of how much suffering and inhumane behaviour goes on inside those halls. From the point of view of our current society, this is considered by the majority of people a normal (and even necessary) part of our food system. But this hasn't always been a predominant view. From the point of view of an indigenous culture that lives with the natural ecosystem, this is an unimaginable crime. So why did this become normal? First because our culture of today is the descendant of cultures that made it through the history of competition for domination - peaceful cultures mostly didn't win that game, those that were the most willing to exploit in order to gain power did. And second, economic selection and economies of scale since the industrial revolution made those who were the most able to mass produce at low cost (i.e. stuff the most animals as possible into a space, deny them any freedom, feed them stuff that makes them get big as soon as possible and streamline the killing such that it's done in the most cost-efficient way) the most successful at capturing the market.

Getting back to the original question - what kind of behaviour does the economic system incentivize? The answer is simple - the behaviour that gets you the most competitive advantage.

It can be argued that this is a good thing - this is, after all, what drives innovation and what caused massive economic growth in the last couple hundred years that raised the living standard of many people. Also, there are some genuinely socially and environmentally beneficial things that also bring competitive advantage - like building communities based on shared values.

But here's the part that's missing from this popular progress narrative. Most of this growth came from plundering the commons and externalizing all the harmful effects to nature or societies at large. An industrial capitalistic society is not that different from colonialism - it requires both taking something by force (like destroying natural habitats and ecosystems for mining or agriculture, economically or militarily forcing people in poor countries to work in miserable conditions, or in modern digital times capturing consumers' attention and data to turn them into profit) and avoiding accountability for negative effects it produces (like pollution, degradation of environment, health impacts...). The fundamental mantra on which this model depends is PRIVATIZE THE GAINS, SOCIALIZE THE LOSSES.

Another way all of this has become normalized in modern global economy is by virtue of the fact that supply chains are abstracted away from consumers - there's a large psychological (and often also physical) distance between the consumer and the negative impacts the products have. Buying chicken breasts in the supermarket doesn't make most consumers feel like they're doing anything unethical, while working in a factory chicken farm probably would. Buying a new phone feels normal, while killing all life in a region rich with precious metals and then forcing children to dig the metals out so that Apple can show a profit probably wouldn't.

All of this is not to say that everything in the economy or everyone who succeeds is unethical. But, it is to say that the economic incentive to participate in or to turn a blind eye to the dark side of economic activity is very strong. And this does inevitably lead to those willing to behave in such a way achieving more economic and political success on average, which means they have a stronger weight in determining the future direction of economic activity, which roots the economy even deeper in unethical ground - it's a vicious cycle.

Governance of technology development process

Leaded gasoline is a very good case study of how inadequate regulations and ethical guardrails are when it comes to novel technologies. It's very worthy to remember such stories because at the time of this writing, in 2026, we are in a decisive time regarding heavily regulating AI development.

Tetraethyllead (TEL) was introduced in the 1920s as an antiknock agent - a gasoline additive that prevents engine knocking, which was a very common phenomenon where fuel ignition didn't happen at the optimal point in the cycle, leading to large inefficiencies, wear and noise in internal combustion engines. The use of this leaded gasoline quickly spread across the globe as it enabled much more efficient and comfortable cars, as well as making the industry happy.

What it also did is it dispersed an estimated 15 million tonnes of lead - a known neurotoxin - all over the atmosphere (Hewitt, C Nicholas; Rashed, M B, 1988). In 2011, researchers retroactively estimated the annual impact of tetraethyl lead worldwide to be 1.1 million excess deaths, 322 million lost IQ points, 60+ million crimes, and 4% of worldwide GDP (Tsai, Peter L.; Hatfield, Thomas H., 2011).

Lead poisoning was well known at the time. In fact, 17 workers for the Ethyl Corporation, DuPont, and Standard Oil died from the effects of exposure to lead in the 1920s. The same companies, however, successfully lobbied against the bans on the compound.

This story ties together with the previous chapter about how economic incentives overpower ethical considerations, but it also highlights the importance of strong governance before the technology actually gets launched. TEL was banned only after the aforementioned damage was already done. Such regulation couldn't fix the damage - it just prevented the worsening of it.

In retrospect, we may be surprised by how this could happen. But, we're not any better at it today. Social media companies still enjoy massive profits at the expense of global mental health without any meaningful restrictions. AI race is still accelerating and even though most experts are deeply worried about potential impacts, nobody is willing to halt development until proper assessment and regulation is put in place. Technology advances exponentially faster than regulation - if we let technologies advance at their own pace, regulation will always catch up too late. And with exponentially increasing power of technology, the consequences of unregulated use keep getting worse.

This makes the technology development process heavily skewed towards the narrow benefits that can be sold (like making engines more efficient and boosting economic growth) and away from properly considering negative consequences (such considerations would slow down and in some cases halt development). The economic incentive of course is, again, to turn a blind eye to unethical parts and even willingly deceive. This has become so perverse that many will say something in the lines of "I'm an optimist and I rather focus on the benefits" in order to justify not dealing with risks.

This brings us naturally to the next question - what could an ethical progress look like and how can we get there?

What could ethical progress look like?

What will follow is by no means a bullet-proof recipe or the only way to do it or "expert advice". It is a set of guiding principles and boundary conditions for further development that follows directly from observing the nature of the current systemic failures. While far from a comprehensive action plan, it should be able to provide a reasonable framework for what we should focus our attention to. For the sake of structured writing, we divide it into 3 levels - personal, organizational and systemic. Of course they are interconnected and it could be structured in many different ways, so take it simply as one of the possible frameworks - a useful model.

1. On a personal level

It would be great if we lived in a world where ethical behaviour (or at least reasonable behaviour looking at long-term outcomes) was the norm. But we don't. Doing what's morally good (or sensible and healthy in the long term) and doing what's most convenient or "normal" or economically favorable are often not the same. What does that mean for each of us? What qualities can we cultivate inside of ourselves to deal with this conflict?

We can first look into how our own goals and desires are conditioned by the environment we live and grew up in. We formed all sorts of habits as a result of this conditioning - some of them healthy, some of them unhealthy; some of them altruistic and caring, some of them egoistic and ignorant. Can we simultaneously accept that this is a part of us and work towards forming better habits? Whether we call this a spiritual process or personal growth, it's on each of us to decide whether we keep giving into our pre-conditioned, often destructive, behavioral patterns while maintaining a superficial image of ourselves, or become progressively more authentic and accountable for the way we show up to the world around us (and, after all, to ourselves - I myself am my most ruthless judge and it's interesting how far we're willing to go in order to fool ourselves into believing that what we're doing is okay - religious conflict being a prime example of this).

Whatever path we choose for this - be it meditation, therapy, nature walks, training, communities or whatever else - it involves purposefully distancing from the endless stream of stimuli that keep us trapped in the same patterns. Social media, news, FOMO (fear of missing out), all sorts of errands that we do only to support a lifestyle that's not even healthy for us, desires we didn't even have before our minds were raped by ads, job stress that results from fictional competitive pressures and not from actually working hard towards any meaningful cause - these are all examples of stimuli that keep us in the hamster wheel and distract us from reality inside and outside of us. Whatever is left of us when we untie our sense of identity from all that bullshit, that's what really matters.

We also want to cultivate courage and inner strength, as that's what it takes to follow through on the above insights. Acknowledging that I'm addicted to approval of other people is one thing - being the first one to stand up for the right thing knowing that I may get rejected and ridiculed is another. We can start small. Form lifestyle habits that maintain healthy mind and body. Connect with like-minded people to support you. Pick up a piece of trash in the street. Get comfortable with opposing views. Speak up to your boss when you don't agree with your company's policy. Gradually, we can build our identity around standing up for something, instead of approval, economic success and conformity. And gradually, we can become willing to let go of the illusion of safety (a steady job for example) in order to participate in endeavours that actually make sense.

Finally, we want to revive a sense of connection with the communities and the world we live in. We know in theory that we're deeply connected with everything around us - that plants give us oxygen and food, that in turn we give them carbon dioxide and organic matter, that we rely on a stable climate, that ecosystems provide natural resilience, that we're social beings who depend on communities, that we can thrive by collaborating etc... But our civilization is not structured in accordance with this. The dominant political and economic paradigm is competition and pursuit of self-interest and economists are still preaching that self-interest will lead to best outcome for everybody via the invisible hand of the market. The material riches we enjoy today are a consequence of centuries of colonial plundering, decimating ecosystems and depleting natural resources. Global economic system relies on constant growth, which can only come from plundering more of the resources - either energy, material or, in the digital age, human attention and the information commons.

If we view ourselves as separate individuals, entitled to satisfy all our desires without thinking about what that means for the whole, we're stuck in perpetual conflict with other individuals and/or other species. But if we view ourselves as a cell in this magnificent big organism, this will naturally lead to an embodied sense of ethics. Just like it's not in my interest to cut off my own arm, it's not in my interest to destroy an ecosystem if I view myself as a part of it.

2. On an organizational level

How do we integrate ethics into organizational processes and technology development? A good place to start looking for answers to this question would be the ethical problems of technology development, mentioned earlier in this article. Namely:

• the value proposition of technology is heavily skewed towards narrow benefits that can be easily sold (like increasing efficiency) and for the most part ignores the harms that are usually more dispersed, indirect, longer-term and hard to measure.

• Dealing with negative effects after the fact is becoming increasingly harder (and less effective because the damage is already done by that point) as technology advances exponentially and gets integrated into the basic infrastructure of human societies.

• the ignorance of risks is incentivized by competitive pressures - proper risk assessment would slow down development or in some cases even halt it, removing the speed-to-market advantage and opening doors for competitors to take advantage of you. It's competitively better to just sell the benefits as fast as possible.

From this, two obvious conclusions can be made.

First, we want to rethink the competitive economic dynamics. Of course we're not saying that there shouldn't be competition - it is, after all, also an integral part of life, evolution and natural ecosystems. But it needs to be reframed and governed. For the most part, this needs to be addressed on a systemic level - changing the economic environment to provide better incentives for organizations to compete on. We'll talk about this in the next section. What organizations (especially firms) can do themselves though, is choose what they want to compete on and acknowledge the limits.

There are literally an infinite number of market niches and ways to provide value to your audience or customers. You can choose what to compete on. Straightforward examples are: competing on price vs. competing on quality; competing by making the existing technology or process more efficient or competing by coming up with ways of doing things that make the existing technologies and processes obsolete; competing by offering quick fixes with immediate but short-lived results, or competing by offering long-term solutions with more gradual results.

Each of those options can be fine for a specific purpose, but you need to be clear on what that purpose is. For example, quick fixes can be appropriate sometimes. Painkillers are very useful when recovering from a bad injury or operation - but if you start competing on the volume of painkillers sold, this will inevitably lead to misuse, where people start taking them for every petty headache or pain, leading to lower pain tolerance and less effort to actually fix the root cause of the pain. This misuse of medication without addressing root causes of health issues is the core problem the pharma industry is causing.

This brings us to limits. If the goal of a company is just to get larger and compete for the sake of competing, it's bound to create harmful externalities and ultimately hurt itself. Every firm and organization needs to be clear on what the purpose of their products or services is and within what context and limits they actually serve that purpose without compromising something else.

The second thing we want to do in order to make our organizations ethical is integrate considerations of indirect effects into the core of our development processes. Because we tend to focus more on the desired benefits and because fixing the damages once the technology is already out there is very difficult, we need to purposefully think about what the consequences might be, and we need to do it before we even launch.

That means for every major decision, going through the process of answering the questions such as: What else might happen as a consequence of this besides what we intend? How will our product (or whatever else you're developing) prompt the users to behave differently? What can happen as a consequence of that? How can it be misused and who would have the incentive to misuse it? What natural resources are needed along the entire lifecycle and how are they sourced? And more...

This is basically a version of rigorous quality control, but with a much broader scope. For example in software development and cybersecurity, teams spend a lot of effort deliberately trying to break the software in order to catch flaws. We want to apply the same principle here, but instead of just trying to break the product, we're trying to break society and the integrity of our living environment using the product. When we catch the flaws, we go back to the drawing board and think about how we will ensure that that doesn't happen. Maybe extra regulation will be needed. Maybe a usage limit is appropriate. Maybe we can change the design. Maybe the technology needs to coexist with a different social system. Or maybe we had the wrong idea in the first place and the product will cause more harm than good. The point is to not only reap the benefits, but also take responsibility to prevent the harms.

3. On a systemic level

Organizations and individuals by ourselves can only do so much. At the end of the day, we're a part of an economic system and as we already explained, the system incentivizes unethical behaviour and ignorance. A real change must therefore reflect itself in the fundamental transformation of the economic paradigm.

First, we need to acknowledge that economic competition is of very different nature than competition in, say, an evolutionary context. This is due to two main features of the economy as we know it today: technology and financial structure.

• Technology: it allows us to break through the limits of our own energy and capability by employing huge amounts of exogenous energy (previously animals that are stronger than us, now energy from sources such as fossil fuels or nuclear) and extending the impact well beyond what any group of people could do themselves. No other organism can do that. That's why the competitive dynamics in nature are limited both in space and in scope of impact. Even if, for some reason, one species spreads fast, it will quickly exhaust its own food supply and eventually the system will balance out. Technology allows us to overshoot this natural balance, extract more and depend not only on local ecosystems, but source our life necessities from all over the globe.

• Financial structure: the financial economy that runs on debt, interest and capital ownership allows money to breed more money. This structurally embeds the evolution towards greater inequalities. It makes money not only a medium for transactions of value, but an instrument for accumulation of power. This type of dynamic is also non-existent anywhere else in nature. In contrast to, say, co-evolution where competition between prey and predator results in both becoming fitter, capitalist economy results in only a few firms or individuals holding the majority of power.

The combination of technology and the underlying financial structure means that there is a lack of direct counter-balancing forces that would keep the economy within the sustainable limits. It allows it to run on destruction of its natural and social substrate, and on shifting the burden to future generations. But not indefinitely of course. At some point all the debt held to nature and the future society becomes too much of a burden and the system starts collapsing. We're likely to be already deep in that phase now.

We want to change this competitive dynamic. We want to change the incentives such that the economic system doesn't raise self-interested power-hungry individuals, but individuals contributing to common good. We want healthy competition, not wars for domination over nature or other people. We want public institutions that are not slaves to money, but hold the fundamental values of society in place. And we want education that raises empowered adults that express their innate talents, not mindless cogs in an economic machine.

This implies an economic system not even close to what we have now. It means eradication of debt and interest-based finance. It means redesign of legal entities, corporate personhood and ownership structures. It means de-colonization, reduction of reliance on global supply chains and increase of local economic sovereignty. It means a public institutional structure that doesn't depend on economic growth to function. It means breaking up of global power structures and the establishment of rules that inhibit the accumulation of power that allows single individuals or entities to sway such massive influence (the same logic as the way anti-monopoly rules should prohibit single firms from holding power over the market).

This is one of the main topics of our research and a progressively growing body of ideas about what this new economy might look like and how we could make it happen can be found there. It's a far stretch to try to imagine it happening from the point where we are now. But that only makes it that much important to bring this up in as many discussions as possible, and maybe in a few years from now it won't seem so out-of-this-world anymore.