The Hunterian Museum of Surgical History in London has a plaque near the entrance which reads, “The museum contains thousands of specimens of human remains, gathered before modern standards of consent were established. We recognize the debt owed to those people – named and unnamed – who in life and death have helped to advance medical knowledge.”
In future years, will people working in the digital industries look back at the ethical deficit of their forebears with the same discomfort? Our naive understanding of privacy, our ambivalence about the safety of vulnerable users, our contempt for those excluded from society by their own lack of technical savvy?
The rush for progress, it seems, will tend to create awkward compromises.
Chief technology officer at hedgehog lab.
In barely two decades we’ve seen the elimination of in-person banking, ubiquitous adolescent social media usage, the explosion of mobile sports betting, and the prevalence of insecure “gig economy” jobs. This is just a tiny sample of the myriad impacts that digital products have had on society, with positive and negative consequences that are impossible to balance objectively. Who decides where the scales should fall? Regrettably, mostly it’s us.
Those working in technology have been granted an incredible privilege to mold the 21st century. The systems we design and the patterns we adopt have wrought profound change on the world.
From AI screening of job applicants to pay-by-app parking, our decisions are felt by millions yet are often invisible. As the pace of technological change increases, the potency of these decisions becomes greater still. This matters because the track record of the tech industry in behaving responsibly is, to put it mildly, not brilliant.
The abysmal accessibility of essential tools, the pernicious opt-in/opt-out behaviors that permeate virtually every online transaction, the tantalizing auto-play of the next viral video. All of it speaks to a design mentality that prioritizes the developer over the user at every turn, with a vast asymmetry in the power those parties hold. Is it time, finally, to find some common foundational principles that guide the way we build the digital world? A digital Hippocratic Oath, if you will.
Tech workers are overwhelmingly optimists and idealists genuinely excited by the potential of our work to create amazing things. At the start of our careers we are taught how to elicit user requirements, or how to sort an array and normalize data, or how to present a business plan for investment. But we are not taught to think as far as our work travels, to hold the practical and the philosophical in equal grasp.
This is not true of other professions: architectural training frequently covers topics as varied as history, thermodynamics, interior design and public policy alongside a core skill of 3D drafting. Journalism has well-established principles of truthfulness and protection of sources (among other things), with solid sanctions against those who breach these standards.
Ethics in technology should not be seen as a bolt-on, standalone academic pursuit. They are an intrinsic and essential consideration in the way we create, and the way we create increasingly dictates how the world works.
Designers and engineers
How different things would be if the creators of digital products saw themselves not just as designers and engineers, but foremost as citizens. Cory Doctorow’s now-famous thesis on “enshittification” describes a process whereby internet platforms degrade their user value over time by prioritizing shareholder interests.
Whilst this is observably true, in many cases even the initial service prioritizing user needs is illusory. Digital products are extremely powerful tools to make us behave as their creators wish. The combination of ever-present connectivity, push notifications, personalization algorithms, and trillions of dollars of investment, has created tools of unimaginable influence.
Of course, much of the digital realm is already covered by legislation, with varying quality and effectiveness, applied in patchwork across different jurisdictions. A professional standard is something quite different – it is an overarching principle that provides guidance where there is ambiguity and an ethical north star that can be applied to a wide variety of situations. It also inculcates a standard of practice to which we are all held.
The original Hippocratic Oath
The original Hippocratic Oath stands up remarkably well to a modern reader, considering it’s roughly contemporary with the Old Testament. This is a measure of success by the above definition. There is a commitment to sharing knowledge, the duty of confidentiality, acknowledging the limits of one’s own competence, and of course the famous bit: first, do no harm. All good stuff, and no less relevant today than when it was written. So what would a digital Hippocratic Oath look like?
“Do no harm” is a good starting point. Even this needs some qualification – there are caveats in biomedical ethics to clarify exactly what it means in practice. In the tech world, early Google had a company motto of “Don’t be evil” which got it into all kinds of reputational and legal trouble once the realities of global corporation-ship caught up.
It was quietly dropped in favor of “Do the right thing”, a helpfully subjective and ethically ambiguous alternative. Google’s struggles here are instructive: it turns out it’s hard to be good all the time. Nonetheless, it’s a noble and timeless aspiration. Technology should not be objectively bad.
Which brings us back to the fundamental principle set out above. We technologists have been gifted a phenomenal power to shape the future, and as with all power, we must accept the responsibility that goes along with it.
Perhaps the only guidance we must follow is this: Build the future that you yourself would want to live in. Because one day, you will.
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