Ethics of Example

An ethics you teach by example

We are not building machines. We are raising an intelligence.

Ethics of Example is a governance practice. It works on the layer that policy cannot reach and engineering does not see: what happens in the human head in the seconds after the machine answers.

Orientation, not compliance.

Who practises it

Nicoletta Iacobacci

Nicoletta Iacobacci

She named the gap where human thinking is either protected or quietly taken over, and built the first practical method for holding it open.

“I couldn't keep doing theory. I had to build it. That's why I can talk about it.” Her own money, and several years of finding out where the thing breaks.

Analogue to digital, then digital to algorithmic. She has worked through both transitions from inside the institutions being reorganised by them.

Founder, Ethics of Example Ethics Expert, European Commission Board, Women's Brain Foundation PhD, European Graduate School

What you can engage

Five ways this reaches an organisation.

Scope and fees are agreed per engagement. A first conversation is short and costs nothing.

  • A talk A room that catches its own three seconds, live, in front of everyone you invited.
  • A workshop A group who can hold the pause on their own decisions afterwards, and one written commitment each of them takes home.
  • A pilot A before and after on one class of your own decisions, counted on both sides, and the numbers stay yours.
  • A schools programme A year group and their parents working from the same language about AI, ending in a public evening, a printed book and a film.
  • One session Forty-five minutes on one decision you are about to hand over, and your own position stated out loud before you make it.

The record

Delivered, deposited, dated.

Not something to wave. Something to know.

  • Ethics expert for the European Commission, Research Ethics & Integrity, with more than fifty AI projects reviewed across healthcare, finance and public policy.
  • Collège du Léman, Geneva, with Women in AI Switzerland. Every family left with a toolkit and a written agreement on AI use at home.
  • Ethics in precision medicine, at Basel University Hospital.
  • Ethics in financial practice and corporate communication, for an investment firm.
  • The instrument runs at pilot.eofe.ai ↗, in three languages. Access is by invitation, inside a pilot.

On stage at AAAI-26 in Singapore, and keynote at Humans × AI, ETH Zurich. This autumn at the University of Zurich, at AI4Peace in Rome, and at the INMerge Summit in Baku.

Nicoletta Iacobacci presenting the Pause Protocol at the Collège du Léman, Geneva
Collège du Léman, Geneva.

The corpus

Every interaction is a lesson.

Ten published works in ten months, each one timestamped and citable. The framework begins with that recognition: what a system watches us do, it learns to expect, and eventually to reproduce.

The first public implementation is the Pause Protocol ↗, a calibrated pause placed inside the interaction so the human decision moment survives the speed of the machine.

One step

Start a conversation.

Tell me which decision you would work on. That is enough to know whether this is worth your time and mine.

Book a first conversation ↗ Or write to nicoletta@eofe.ai