על מה אנחנו מדברים כשאנחנו מדברים על אתיקה אלגוריתמית? המקרה של מדעני נתונים בישראל

Literature on AI ethics tends to examine the subject through philosophical, legal, or technocratic perspectives, largely neglecting the sociocultural one. This literature also overwhelmingly focuses on the US. Aiming to fill these gaps, this article explores how Israeli data scientists understand, interpret, and depict algorithmic ethics. Based on a pragmatist sociological analysis of 60 semi-structured interviews, we ask: which ideologies, discourses and worldviews construct algorithmic ethics? Our findings point to three dominant moral logics: A) ethics as a personal endeavor; B) ethics as hindering progress; and C) ethics as a commodity. We show that while data science is a nascent profession, these moral logics originate from the techno-libertarian culture of its parent-profession – engineering, and they accordingly prevent the institutionalization of an agreed-upon moral regime. Thus, this paper offers to see algorithmic ethics in a contextualized perspective and explore how data scientists practically see and construct their ethics.