Why Should We Care About Technology Ethics?

Last year the ACM updated the Code of Ethics. What was your role with them?

I was on the steering committee to redevelop the ACM Code of Ethics. I was invited to do this because of my history looking at things like how do we practically integrate ethics in industry, how do we make a more responsible ethical society through tech, how do we get tech working with and for society, and the like.

The reason we updated  it in the first place is because the previous version was written in 1992, which is a little bit out of date. Since then, the Internet (and many other new and exciting technologies) came along, and it affected society in completely new and interesting ways that we didn't actually expect when the original code was written. Don Gotterbarn,  who was involved in writing the original code, was the chair of the Code update committee.

How do you answer someone who says the goal of a corporation is to return value to their shareholders, not to be ethical, not to do social good?

The original purpose of business is to serve society. If you don't serve society it’s less likely that someone will buy your product because you're not going to have a market. And these days there's a been huge push from society towards requiring more ethical business practices. We've also seen pushback from employees within several well-known large companies when it comes to ethical issues, so there’s internal as well as external push for more ethical technologies. We're seeing these sorts of demands for more environmental considerations, more sustainability considerations, and more concern for the societal impact of technologies too.

People are worried about their data, they're worried about their privacy, they're worried about their kids, they're worried about all kinds of ethical issues that impact them. The fact that a lot of these companies have been able to operate in a relatively grey area for so long has meant that we've actually seen where these cases can go. There's now demand for governments to regulate more heavily, as can be seen with the GDPR.

What do you hope people leave your talk with?

First, I hope that they'll leave with the idea that the Code of Ethics is not just a punitive kind of “Thou Shall Not” set of directions, because what we wanted to do with this code is also to make it an aspirational set of guidelines for positively working in the tech industry. 

We're aiming at anyone who works in computing, even if it's just peripherally, such as doing data entry in a finance job or something like that. We want to inspire people to think about their role and its impact on society, doing their job ethically and responsibly, and these ethical guidelines will hopefully help them do much more in service of society.

There are also some quite interesting nuances that I think some of the more philosophical minded people amongst the audience might be interested in like how we came up with the wording for some of the clauses.