Ethics Right From the Start

The end of the year 2021 brought an extraordinary announcement that a technological genie was being shoved back into its bottle: Facebook (now: Meta) stopped using the facial-recognition software that allows it to automatically detect and tag people in photos and videos. Over the decade in which this capability has been in place, over a third of its users had set their profiles to allow the site to create a template to spot their face and use that identification in various ways. Now, those individual templates, numbering over a billion, are all deleted. 

The company’s pledge is interesting and important because this was a move based on one thing: ethics. But for anyone focused on that topic, the dismaying aspect of the news is that decade of prior use. If the software is so at odds with the set of moral principles that should govern a tech company’s behavior, why did it take so long to figure that out? Couldn’t anyone see this clash coming?

The Role of Ethics

The mistake is extraordinary in its scale but all too typical of how organizations bring ethics into their decision-making: it is far too often a distant afterthought. On one level, this is an issue of roles. Most people working on digital transformations in organizations—let alone developing the relevant technologies—are not the same people who think of themselves as ethically responsible for corporate conduct. To the extent the word ethics comes up in their daily lives, it is most often in a reference to someone else’s job—perhaps their company has a “chief ethics officer”—or to a brief training module their compliance group obliges them to sit through on a screen. Often, their experience of the word feels like a threat. At the end of an exciting project to develop a new digital innovation, few teams like to hear that “before we can launch, we have to run it by the ethics people.”

This tendency to see ethics as an obstructing voice, slowing things down or preventing new tech offerings by asking critical questions, becomes more of a problem as innovation moves faster. The intervals for new technologies get smaller and smaller and their breakthrough applications rush the markets. Conceived as an afterthought, ethical questions can only play the role of a spoiler—and potentially a magnet for negative public attention. This means as long as ethics responds to innovation, it will constantly be outpaced. And time will be wasted on development efforts that were ethically flawed from the start.

Worse, by getting around to ethical considerations at the end of an innovation process instead of putting them front and center from the beginning, companies are undoubtedly missing opportunities to develop the technologies that would benefit the world most. 

Interaction Between Ethics and Technology

The relationship of ethics and technology should be understood as reciprocal, with each contributing to the other. Applications of groundbreaking technologies often reshape the ethical environment by creating new solutions to societal challenges and new value. At the same time, scientists and technologists all perform their work within an ethically informed context. Meanwhile, ethics contributes to technology by stimulating technological innovation, by recognizing technological inventions, and by providing ethical guidance. 

Ethics Enabling Technology

We could go even further to state that ethics belongs to technology. Horizons of meaning and ethical ends inform technology in an ethical sense. Ethics should be considered right from the start because of the very nature of technology as a human creation. As agendas are set for technology research and development, what other than ethics should guide the priorities?

Ethics bears on technology even by setting the parameters in which research, discussions, and studies can be conducted. No one should delude themselves that freedom of research cannot be infringed. New ideas and discoveries have always faced suppression on ethical grounds, because they represent challenges to putative “absolute truths” or undermine the enforcement of economic or political power structures. Even in today’s world, the danger of members of the technology community not being able to conduct their research freely and independently still exists.

Ethics can be useful in another way, by interrogating the often vague or hyperbolic claims associated with new technologies. From the ethicist’s standpoint, for example, even the term “artificial intelligence” deserves serious pushback, because it implies a faithful imitation of human intelligence, when the technology is actually limited to the simulation of only certain cognitive capacities. Moral capability is, for example, one of the areas of human intelligence which “artificial intelligence” cannot achieve due to its lack of freedom and autonomy. 

Impact of Ethics

Ethics is needed because the present situation and status quo in this area are so alarming (e.g., technology-based totalitarian surveillance, digitally enabled manipulation of democratic opinion-forming- and decision-making processes, …).

Ethics is needed as well because those who have created the fundamental problems and challenges, those who continue to boost the fundamental problems and challenges, and those who have benefitted and continue to benefit from the fundamental problems and challenges impose themselves as voices in the public discourse – with pseudo-ethical contributions serving again only their particular self-interests.

Ethics is needed to pose the question of who we want to be as humans and what should and shouldn’t be in these transformational times. Ethics is needed to counter the spreading of indifference and so that we don’t simply get used to everything that seems to overrun us due to the mutual reinforcement between the globalized economy and digital transformation. Ethics is needed so that digital transformation does not simply happen, but that we humans can shape it.

AI? Data-Based Systems!

An ethical argument might, thus, suggest another term for “artificial intelligence”, such as “data-based systems”, would be more appropriate. It would serve to remind everyone that what is actually involved in “artificial intelligence” is generation, collection, and evaluation of data; data-based perception (sensory, linguistic); data-based predictions; and data-based decisions. The term “data-based systems” would usefully highlight the main strength and the main weakness of the present technological achievement in this field: the mastery of an enormous quantity of data. Pointing to its core characteristic—being based on data and relying exclusively on data in all its processes, its own development, and its actions (or, more precisely, its reactions to data)—would do much to dispel the inappropriate attribution of the myth of “intelligence” covering substantial problems and challenges of data-based systems. This allows for more accurateness and precision in the critical reflection of data-based systems.

At the same time, ethics can limit technology as well. For example, health and safety guidelines, patents, intellectual property rights, competition policy, consumer protection, and ethical codes of conduct belong to this category. This impact of ethics can be perceived as blocking and hindering technological innovation. In reality, ethics is only informing the innovation process that not everything that is doable is ethically good and should be done.

New Approach in Business and Management

For business leaders and managers, conceiving the relationship of ethics and technology as reciprocal means in practical terms to define an ethical framework at the outset of a venture within which this endeavor has to be undertaken. Moreover, they need to create contexts and working-environments where an ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue between the tech-teams and ethicists should be an essential ingredient of innovation-processes right from the beginning. Ethics should be involved because only the precise identification of ethical opportunities and ethical risks of technological progress offers the required clarity and eventually allows for using the first and mastering the latter. Ethics with its own complexity is needed, so that digital transformation will neither be reduced to economic calculations and increasing efficiency nor to a pure instrument of marketing and “artificial stupidity”, but can really rise to its potential. Finally, at the beginning of a venture, decision-makers should address the following 5 questions: 1) Which purpose do we serve with this venture? 2) What are the ethical opportunities and the ethical risks of this venture? 3) Do we contribute to the sustainable flourishing of humans and of the environment with this venture? 4) Would we like to find an ethical analysis of the internal setup and the working-conditions of this innovation-process in the news? 5) Would the generation of our potential great-grandchildren be proud of us because of this venture?

Which Ethics? Ethics of Human Rights!

Perhaps you are asking yourself at this point: what exactly is the set of moral principles that should guide us in innovation? Which ethics should advice technological process? There are certainly different options, but consider the urgent importance in today’s society of climate change and also the persistence of human rights violations linked with technology progress – for example, in the process of exploiting natural resources necessary for technologies or in the value chain of technological products. In this context, the ethics that could be organizations’ best frame of reference are the ethics of human rights. Human rights as ethical frame of reference could provide as a minimum requirement the necessary normative guidance. Human rights offer the major benefit of being based on a simple concept and focusing on the essentials: Besides the ethical justifiability of human rights and their universality, they define the minimum standards guaranteeing that all humans – always, everywhere – can physically survive and lead a life with dignity – a life worth living. They also encourage and foster innovation by protecting people’s freedom to think, express their opinion, and access information, as well as promote pluralism by respecting each person’s right to self-determination.

Putting ethics of human rights at the start of innovation-processes and implementing an interdisciplinaryinteraction between technologies and ethics throughout the entire lifecycle of venture will allow humanity and the planet to flourish and to enjoy a humane and sustainable future.