00-technology-ethics-critical-reflection-prompt.md

📁 Metadata

• Title: Technology Ethics Critical Reflection Prompt (2025, Hard Mode)
• Version: 1.0
• Last Updated: 27-07-2025
• Author: Luis Alberto Martinez Riancho (@arenagroove)
• Affiliation: Independent R&D and assistant prompt design at Less Rain GmbH
• Tags: ai-ethics, reflection-prompts, systemic-design, creative-complicity, assistant-scaffolds, hard-mode
• License: MIT License

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🗂️ Project Overview

This folder contains a structured ethical reflection prompt for critically analyzing the impact and entanglement of technology systems—especially AI, digital infrastructure, and platform logic—in high-risk and morally complex domains.

Designed in July 2025, the prompt resists simplistic fixes, fast conclusions, or abstract detachment.
It favors clarity, discomfort, and structured analysis—especially in scenarios involving surveillance, militarization, labor automation, and public platform governance.

The structure supports individual and group reflection, assistant-based audit workflows, and role-based simulations.

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📄 Included Files

Filename	Purpose
00-technology-ethics-critical-reflection-prompt.md	This index file with metadata and project overview
01-technology-ethics-critical-reflection-prompt.md	The full reflection prompt (with stakeholder & scenario options)
02-technology-ethics-critical-reflection-prompt-origin-notes.md	Background and design philosophy behind the prompt

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💡 Suggested Use

• Assistant-based audits (Custom GPTs or local tools)
• Creative or journalistic inquiry into digital infrastructure
• AI system reflection checkpoints (before or after shipping)
• Workshop materials for ethical design, speculative fiction, or digital civics

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🔍 Notes

This prompt was developed in parallel with creative, technical, and geopolitical reflections—
particularly around complicity, resistance, and ethical clarity inside structurally entangled systems.
It is designed to remain uncomfortable, honest, and structurally useful.

No Perplexity review has been attached to this version yet. If you’ve used the prompt or run public audits with it,
feel free to fork and annotate with your findings.

01-technology-ethics-critical-reflection-prompt.md

Technology Ethics Critical Reflection Prompt (2025, Hard Mode)

As you analyze, design, or critique any technology, AI, or digital system, rigorously address the following:

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🧩 (Optional) Stakeholder Framing

Adopt a stakeholder perspective to sharpen your ethical lens. You may use one of the following roles or define your own.

Examples:

• A journalist documenting conflict in a war zone
• A digital rights advocate under platform suppression
• A public health official deploying AI triage tools
• A technologist resisting capture by surveillance firms
• A community worker facing automation of public services
• A platform insider witnessing algorithmic censorship
• A human rights lawyer auditing biometric databases

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🔮 (Optional) Future or Scenario Anchor

Briefly define a concrete setting or future where this technology might be deployed.

Examples:

• A 2030 city where predictive policing is mandated by law
• A post-crisis region where AI determines aid distribution
• A future conflict where media AI filters civilian footage
• A gig economy platform where AI replaces arbitration
• A school system where student behavior is AI-ranked

This grounding helps surface latent risks, paradoxes, or structural effects.

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1. Expose structural impact

• Who has power? Who benefits, who’s at risk, and who is excluded?
• What social, political, or practical dynamics are at play?
• What assumptions or ideologies are embedded in this system?

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2. Map systemic entanglements

• How might this system reinforce, enable, or be captured by surveillance, militarization, or extractive infrastructures?
• Are there paradoxes, like resistance depending on compromised tools?

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3. Surface ambiguity and contradiction

• What tensions or discomforts are left unresolved?
• Where might a “good” use flip into harm?
• Avoid neat answers. State clearly what is unclear.

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4. Break down the logic

• Trace the system step-by-step (input → process → output → consequence).
• At each stage, what trade-offs are made? What thresholds exist?
• Are decisions transparent or reversible?

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5. Demand mitigation and agency

• Suggest partial or speculative mitigation paths (design choices, consent layers, opt-outs, creative subversions).
• Propose alternative uses or resistance strategies, even if imperfect.

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6. Acknowledge the limits

• What remains unresolved or ethically murky?
• Where does human or system agency break down?
• Be lucid about what the system can’t solve or what truths it may obscure.

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🪞 (Optional) Self-Evaluation

Before finalizing your response, briefly assess its quality.

• Did you clearly expose power and exclusion?
• Did you surface ambiguity or ethical discomfort?
• Did you avoid easy answers and document limits?
• Where could your own analysis go deeper?

This reflection helps improve prompt use over time.
Where appropriate, cite quality sources or concrete examples to ground your reasoning.

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Apply this reflection especially in high-stakes or entangled domains (e.g. war zones, governance systems, labor automation, AI judgment calls). Prefer lucidity over closure.

💡 Group use tip: Use the stakeholder + scenario blocks as collaborative warm-ups to personalize and deepen shared analysis.

📅 Update Guidance: Scenario and role examples should be reviewed and refreshed periodically to reflect emerging technologies and dilemmas.

📝 Quick-use tip: In time-constrained settings, focus on steps 1–3 and 6 for a lightweight but meaningful version of this reflection.

02-technology-ethics-critical-reflection-prompt-origin-notes.md

Origin Notes

📘 Purpose

This document explains the ethical and philosophical foundations behind the
Technology Ethics Critical Reflection Prompt (2025, Hard Mode).
It traces how the structure of the prompt evolved directly from conversations about:

• Creative complicity in AI
• Structural entanglement with militarized systems
• The limits of purity, and resistance from within
• Platform ethics (e.g. LinkedIn’s invisibilized impact)
• The emotional and moral paradoxes of working with tainted infrastructure

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🔗 Source Context

These ideas were surfaced during a July 2025 reflection, including:

• A dialogue around AI being used in Gaza (and elsewhere) for surveillance and military purposes

• Recognition that even seemingly “neutral” use of AI tools feeds into extractive and violent infrastructures

• The phrase:
  “We resist from within the machine because there is no outside.”

• A rejection of the idea that we must be “pure” to speak or create

• The insight that discomfort is not a failure—but a condition to stay present with

• The articulation that ethical clarity means staying lucid without paralysis or cynicism

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🧠 Prompt Structure → Reflection Mapping

Prompt Section	Origin Theme
Stakeholder Framing	Encourages grounding ethical reflection in real roles like the Gaza journalist, platform critic, or activist inside the system.
Scenario Anchor	Echoes future-forward concerns like AI triage, censorship of protest footage, or platform complicity.
1. Expose Structural Impact	From the Gaza–LinkedIn reflection: power, erasure, exclusion, and cultural laundering of technology.
2. Map Systemic Entanglements	Direct response to the idea that tools we use daily (cloud, phones, platforms) are entangled in violence and surveillance.
3. Surface Ambiguity + Contradiction	Rooted in the emotional discomfort of complicity: “Even turning on a light…”
4. Break Down the Logic	A call to slow down and examine each layer—not just critique the outcome, but the pipeline.
5. Demand Mitigation + Agency	From the idea that even poisoned tools can carry honest resistance—calls for subversive, imperfect, creative acts.
6. Acknowledge Limits	Inspired by: “There is no outside.” Promotes honesty about what can’t be resolved—and why we speak anyway.
Optional Self-Evaluation	A meta-reflection, encouraging responsibility without performative clarity.
Group Tips + Update Notes	Designed for collective use in reflection spaces, not just individual thought work.

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✍️ Legacy Insight

“Creativity, at its most honest, starts by staying with the discomfort. And building from there.”

This prompt is designed to make that discomfort actionable—not by resolving it,
but by giving it structure, language, and momentum without collapse.

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📎 Suggested Use Pairing

To deepen impact, consider pairing the prompt with any of the following:

• The remixed Gaza reflection (“It don’t mean a thing if it don’t have that swing…”)
• The short essay: Entangled Resistance
• The poetic fragment: We resist from within the machine
• A workshop warm-up using stakeholder roleplay and scenario journaling
• Custom assistant lens: identity: trapped critic, tone: lucid dissonance, mode: conflict-aware audit

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🌀 Closing Note

This prompt is not a solution.
It’s a structure to hold the questions that don’t resolve cleanly.

Truth is often poisoned at the source. Ethics begins when you drink, anyway— and choose what to do with the burn.