Bad actors argument is nonsense-the aff will be repurposed by them just as easily

(Annette Zimmermann is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York and Technology & Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. 7-21)

A second obstacle we must reckon with is the contention that developing a potentially harmful technology is better than leaving it to bad actors. Many technologists reason, for example, that if their team does not build a given tool, someone else will—possibly with more sinister motives. On this view, arguments not to build or deploy may look like giving up, or even a way of making things worse. The Stanford researcher who used facial recognition technology for predicting sexual orientation, for example, argued that it would have been “morally wrong” not to publish his work: This is the inherent paradox of warning people against potentially dangerous technology. . . . I stumbled upon those results, and I was actually close to putting them in a drawer and not publishing—because I had a very good life without this paper being out. But then a colleague asked me if I would be able to look myself in the mirror if, one day, a company or a government deployed a similar technique to hurt people. But this argument does not stand up to scrutiny. Nothing prevents a bad actor from repurposing knowledge and technological capabilities gained from an AI tool first developed by a well-intentioned researcher, of course. And even tools developed with good intentions can ultimately have damaging effects.