Ethics in Technology: Where Iterations End and Innovation Begins
Written by Olivia Gambelin Founder of Ethical Intelligence
Innovation, simple in concept yet complex in execution. An aftereffect of the Silicon Valley boom, we learned to associate the word “innovation” with success as the flood of flourishing startup stories oversaturated our understanding of what it meant to thrive in business, and more specifically, in technology.
Flash forward to modern day, and we see that this largely still rings true. It’s near impossible to read an AI policy or strategy without coming across a mention in some form or another towards the need to foster innovation and growth of the technology industry, claiming that this alone will either advance or maintain a country’s competitive edge for decades to come. Despite the continuous calls to action however, execution is not always a guarantee.
Why is that? To understand this conundrum, we must look back on how our modern understanding of innovation in technology came to be and how ethics is the most powerful tool we have to break that cycle.
What Happened to Innovation?
Let us return briefly to the discussion of the Silicon Valley’s role in our understanding of innovation. When things first started to boom, we knew innovation through the lens of game-changing technology. Personal PCs followed by search engines and iPhones, everytime we blinked a new technology was being introduced and followed by a significant shift in how we viewed our world and our roles in it. Fail fast and often became a mantra that fed the breakneck speeds by which we produced the newest, biggest, best things that the technology industry could dream of.
And then things plateaued. There were only so many “next biggest things” to invent before success caught up and turned risk loving entrepreneurs into cautious and skeptical investors. Nowadays, it is rare to see a true innovation hit the market. Instead, we have become accustomed to iterations and incremental feature upgrades being sold under the guise of innovation. Somehow we went from ‘technology that will change your life’, to ‘technology that changed your life, now available in dark mode with stories.’
So what happened? Although multiple factors played their own subsequent roles, there is one major element that stands above the rest in terms of influence: our end-goal for innovation changed.
When things first started, our end-goal for innovation was truly to change the world and the people’s lives in it. But slowly overtime the end-goal of technological innovation shifted to prioritising exits and returns on investment with each new startup success story fortifying and cementing this change into place. Technology was no longer being designed to solve real complex problems felt by real people, it was being designed to be bought by the ever more incumbent tech giants.
Which leads to our current situation. A once thriving industry born out of the need to improve human lives, now just an empire of iterations slowly watching true innovation slipping from its fingers.
Have we gone too far, are we so embedded in our habits that there is no hope of breaking this discouraging cycle? Thankfully, I can confidently tell you no, there is hope for us still. We are humans, and humans are wired to fix problems, sometimes all we need is a little change in perspective to get us out of the rut.
Ethics and the Pursuit of Good Tech
To innovate in industry simply means to introduce something new, be it either an idea, method, or device, that in some way benefits the company. So, allow me now to do just that by introducing ethics into the equation.
Ethics in its traditional form is a branch of philosophy concerned with the moral principles that govern our behavior. In other words, it's the study of right and wrong, as it examines what makes an action good versus bad in relation to our values. The end-goal of all this examining and of ethics itself, you may be surprised to hear, is the pursuit of the ‘good life’. When we are determining what makes an action good or bad, we are essentially asking the question of whether or not that action will lead me closer or further away from achieving my good life, as defined by the values and principles I hold. The true purpose of ethics is not to tell you you’re living your life wrong, the true purpose of ethics is to equip you with the ability to reason through complex situations to arrive at a decision that will ultimately lead you closer to a good and fulfilling life.
This sounds all great, but what does it have to do with technology? If you recall the point earlier about the end-goal of innovation having shifted and being in need of readjustment, you will begin to see where these two points connect.
If we want to once again innovate with the end-goal of creating something that changes people’s lives for the better, then we are going to need a tool that will empower us to make decisions that guide us towards and keep us on track to achieving this end-goal. Ethics, when used to its full potential, is exactly such a tool.
By establishing values for our technology and the conviction to stand by those values, ethics enables the critical examination of design, development, and deployment decisions to determine if these critical choices are either leading us closer or further away from our desired end-goal of innovating to change peoples’ lives for the better. Ethics, simply put, is the essential innovation tool we’ve been missing in pursuit of good technology.
Introducing Ethics as a Service
Curious how you can use ethics to break the cycle of iterations and unlock true innovation in the pursuit of good technology? There are many ways to go about it, but the best place to start is exploring what Ethics as a Service can do for you.
Ethics as a Service (EaaS) is the adaptation of high level ethical frameworks and values to practical actions in relation to your specific use case. Reach out to Ethical Intelligence today to see what EaaS can do for you, or read more about the concept in the first edition of The Equation, your digital tech ethics quarterly magazine.
