In a year that has seen decades’ worth of global shocks, bad news, and scandals squeezed into 12 excruciatingly long months, the summer already feels like a distant memory.
Copyright by venturebeat.com
In August 2020, the world was in the throes of a major social and racial justice movement, and I argued hopefully in VentureBeat that the term “ethical ” was finally starting to mean something .
It was not the observation of a disinterested observer but an optimistic vision for coalescing the ethical community around notions of power, justice, and structural change. Yet in the intervening months it has proven to be, at best, an overly simplistic vision, and at worst, a naive one. The piece critiqued “second wave” ethical as being preoccupied with technical fixes to problems of bias and fairness in . It observed that focusing on technical interventions to address ethical harms skewed the conversation away from issues of structural injustice and permitted the “co-option of socially conscious computer scientists” by big tech companies.
I realize now that this argument minimised the contribution of ethical
Ethics researchers contribute to this movement just by showing up to work every day, taking part in the everyday practice of making technology and championing a “move slow and fix things” agenda against a tide of productivity metrics and growth KPIs. Many of these researchers are taking a principled stand as members of minoritized groups. I was arguing that a focus on technical accuracy narrows the discourse on ethics in
Google’s decision to fire Dr. Timnit Gebru is clear confirmation that ethical tech researchers represent a serious challenge to the companies where they work. Dr. Gebru is a respected Black computer scientist whose most prominent work has championed technically-targeted interventions to ethical harms. Her contract termination by Google has been the subject of much commentary and debate. It reflects an important point: that it doesn’t matter if “ethical
For that reason, Google’s decision to unceremoniously fire an expert, vocal, high-profile employee opens up a critical faultline in the ethical
An ethical agenda holds that moral principles of right and wrong should shape the development of advanced technologies, even as those technologies are too embryonic, amorphous, or mercurial for existing regulatory frameworks to grasp or restrain at speed. “Ethical
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