The Demos-to-Deployment Ethics Gap

Ethical considerations visible in controlled demonstrations often disappear in production systems.

Demo environments allow for careful curation: cherry-picked examples, optimal conditions, human oversight that would be impractical at scale. Production environments expose systems to edge cases, adversarial inputs, and the pressures of real-time decision-making.

The gap isn’t just technical. It’s organizational. Demo-stage ethics discussions involve small teams with time to deliberate. Deployment-stage decisions happen under cost pressure, deadline pressure, and competitive pressure. The people closest to ethical concerns often aren’t empowered to slow a launch.

This explains why organizations can sincerely commit to ethical AI and still ship problematic systems. The commitment was real, it just didn’t survive contact with deployment realities.

Related: 07-molecule—principles-to-practice-translation-problem, 05-atom—voluntary-compliance-gap