The New Need to Teach Technology Ethics

The New Need to Teach Technology Ethics
By Tony Martinez| October 29, 2021

The Hippocratic oath was written in the 5th century BC with on of the first lines stating “I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgement, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.”1 Iterations of this ode has been adopted and updated to be used in medicine and in other industries with the main purpose of stating do no harm. For these industries the onus of the oath falls on the industry and not the patients or users. Is it time now for Technology companies to take a similar oath?

Discussion:
Like many people I use a plethora of applications and websites for things like mobile banking and my daily work or for the occasional dog video. In doing this I blindly accept terms of service, cookie policies, and even share my data such as email for more targeted advertisements. Then I took w231 “Behind the Data: Human and Values” at the University of California Berkeley and was tasked to review these terms and understand them. It was here, where as a master level student, I was frustrated and unable to grasp some of the concepts companies discussed in the terms of service. So how would we expected the 88.75% of US households with social media accounts to be able to navigate such technical legalese.

With the average reading level in the United States being slightly over an 8th grade…

…the onus to protect the users of an application is shifting to the developers. As this shift occurs and we have the same public outcries due to data breaches or research like the Facebook contagion study we must explore if these developers have the tools to make ethical choices. Or if the companies should require them to be better trained and think through all the ethical implications.

These ethical issues are not new to technology or the Silicon Valley. Evidence of ethical issues in Technology can be found by reviewing the founding of the Markkula center in 1986. The purpose of the center was to provide silicon valley decision makers with the tools to properly practice ethics when making decisions. The founder of the center, and former Apple Chairman, Mike Markkula Jr. created this after he felt “[it was clear]”…that there were quite a few people who were in decision-making positions who just didn’t have ethics on their radar screen.” To him it was not that decision makers were being unethical but they didn’t have the tools needed to think ethically. Now the center serves as a location to provide training to companies with regards to technology, AI, and machine learning. This has lead to larger companies like Google to send a number of employees to train at the Markkula center and has since allowed them to develop a fairness module to train developers on the notion of fairness and ethics.  More importantly after its creation google moved to allow the module to be publicly available as it felt the onus of protecting the users of their virtual world fell on the System developers. Googles fairness module even signifies this by stating “As ML practitioners build, evaluate, and deploy machine learning models, they should keep fairness considerations (such as how different demographics of people will be affected by a model’s predictions) in the forefront of their minds.”

It is clear from Googles stance and the growing course work at some public universities that an oath of no harm is needed in technology and is making its way into the education of developers. Such large paradigm shifts regarding ethics by these companies shows the increasing importance for them to train employees. The public view has shifted on them to not only state their ethical views but to prove it with actions and by making items like the fairness module available publicly it provides the groundwork to eventually have it mandatory in the Technology sector and for the Developers.

References:
1. National Institute of Health. (2012, February 07). Greek Medicine: “I Swear by Apollo Physician …” Greek Medicine from the Gods to Galen. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/greek_oath.html
2. Statista Research Department. (2021, June 15). Social media usage in the United States – Statistics & Facts. https://www.statista.com/topics/3196/social-media-usage-in-the-united-states/#dossierKeyfigures
3. Wriber. (Accessed on 2021, October 27). A case for writing below a grade 8 reading level. https://wriber.com/writing-below-a-grade-8-reading-level/
4. Kinster, L. (2020, February 2020). “Ethicists were hired to save tech’s soul. Will anyone let them?”. https://www.protocol.com/ethics-silicon-valley
5. Kleinfeld, S (2018, October 18). “A new course to teach people about fairness in machine learning”. https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/new-course-teach-people-about-fairness-machine-learning/