Within the context of an increasingly technologized society, the ethics of autonomy and informed consent are increasingly threatened. The key factor within this problem is that the technologies that are rapidly changing society are developed with commercial incentives in mind. Unfortunately, commercial incentives often clash with autonomy and informed consent. Typically, commercial incentives encourage consumption and the acquisition of personal data as a resource for training AI. Frequently, we are now put into situations where we do not have the option to not use or to not engage with an AI system. The result of this lack of free choice is a situation where not applying rational self-determination to your own life becomes the norm rather than the exception. Furthermore, the right to refuse the collection of your personal data is increasingly obscured by data processing consent forms with long, obscure, and confusing terminology and unequally prominent options available for consent, rejection, and/or consent revocation. Furthermore, similar problems are plaguing the healthcare and biotechnology industries as patients are often not provided with the full scope of information involving the implications of a medical producer, as well as the alternative treatments available. The result is that people no longer govern their own bodies with the rational intellect because the rational intellect has been denied the time, context, and information needed to come to rationally developed decisions.
The ethics of autonomy and informed consent is not only about obtaining approval for the person giving their consent, but it also carries a deeper meaning. The deeper meaning is that we are obligated to allow for and to support a full, complete, comprehensive, and deliberate intellectual process to occur within the mind of the person who is giving or refusing consent. This process requires sufficient time to evaluate all the relevant information, consider alternative options, reason about the consequences of consenting, and develop a logic-based decision about how the decision relates to the broader context of that person’s needs and desires.
We must be careful not to slip into technocratic societies in which people are constantly trained to be ideal docile consumers and providers of free resources for those who possess corporate and political power. Instead, we must train people to be free, independent, and rational people who exercise their fundamental human right of rational self-determination.