Do tech companies employ ethicists?

April 3, 2018 10:22 AM

Do corporations employ people whose job is to look at the big-picture implications of the work the company does? I’m mainly curious about tech and social media companies and their long-term thinking about social, political, and cultural effects of their products and technology — stuff that’s beyond day-to-day business practices, fiduciary duties, compliance and various CYA-type things — closer to the work that a philosopher of technology does, or perhaps a medical ethicist.

Do companies have processes for considering how a technology can be abused? Do they have people looking at potential second and third order effects of AI? Is there someone who is supposed to see that the values of ‘don’t be evil’ are applied during the development of algorithms that have a tendency to reinforce structural racism? How much space is given to the concept of ‘just because we can do a thing, it doesn’t mean we should do a thing’? Is there even just someone whose job is looking at unintended consequences? Are these questions ridiculously naive?

posted by theory to Technology (18 answers total)

I have worked for various large tech nonprofits that you have heard of and the answer is a resounding no.
posted by jessamyn at 10:37 AM on April 3, 2018 [11 favorites]

Yes, I've spoken with someone who previously worked at Google doing this. Feel free to Memail me.
posted by pinochiette at 10:39 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Some companies employ "human factor engineers," which is meant to help the fact that engineers building circuitboards often forget that there's a human user on the other end of the finished product. They sometimes look into how a product can be abused, as well as the psychology of what makes a good product or a bad product (human leaking eyes=bad!).
posted by Melismata at 10:48 AM on April 3, 2018

Large tech companies definitely do have people like this. I work for a mediumish tech company and we had an "Ethnocultural Researcher" on staff for quite a while to research the effects of our software in countries around the world (she quit). Whether they actually have any leadership authority or influence within their organizations is a completely different matter, and I find it very unlikely that they do.
posted by miyabo at 10:58 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

when I worked for a large semiconductor company they had a corporate ethicist. She gave a couple talks internally that I attended that were interesting, but I don't think the company actually gave her any power beyond letting engineers who were already pre-disposed to wanting to listen to an ethicist for an hour go to her talks.
posted by Dr. Twist at 11:03 AM on April 3, 2018

Response by poster: Follow-up question: Are such positions less likely to exist at startups and rapidly growing companies?
posted by theory at 11:34 AM on April 3, 2018

Best answer: I am a retired software engineer and I've worked at a couple dozen companies, both startups and large established corporations. None of them had what you would consider an ethicist. While the more established companies did often have a person with "ethics" next to their name, the job was always just a Regulatory Compliance Officer with a fancy title and when they would talk about ethics, they would really just mean compliance with whatever regulations apply to that industry. In heavily regulated industries (medical software and military equipment) it meant convincing the auditors that the company is paying attention to ethics in the context of relevant government-sponsored regulations and keeping them generally happy. To that end, these "ethicists" did have the power to make all employees and consultants sit through multiple long presentations with scenario-type role play exercises as well as get a passing grade for multiple ethics quizzes, but that's it.

Newer industries are less regulated by nature so it's not surprising startups don't have compliance officers - unless of course they are "disrupting" a heavily regulated industry, which they typically don't because the cost of entry is very high.
posted by rada at 11:52 AM on April 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

Also ethicists are very far away from revenue creation so it’s unlikely to be something you’d see in a typical startup.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 12:26 PM on April 3, 2018

I've known several large tech companies that have people like this on staff. Not just "compliance officers". More like someone who is hired to think about this stuff and given a lot of free reign.... but as miyabo says, not necessarily real say in the direction of the company. Like hiring a philosopher and letting them get on with the thinking and all, but that doesn't mean they have any veto power over decisions or anything.
posted by thefoxgod at 12:50 PM on April 3, 2018

Yeah, the thing about tech companies is that they're fairly willing to hire people, because salaries are a small fraction of revenue. But actually giving those people worthwhile tasks to do and resources to do them in is a completely different thing.
posted by miyabo at 12:52 PM on April 3, 2018

Are you familiar with Tristan Harris? His path from “Design Ethicist” at Google to outspoken critic of addictive-by-design tech might be of interest to you! In the interview above he does a good job explaining why tech companies profess to care about mindfulness and quality connections and whatever else, but in practice rely upon manipulative and unethical design.

Harris basically makes the argument that while tech companies might be willing to hire an ethicist, they are fundamentally unable to hear and incorporate the feedback needed to conduct themselves ethically, which I buy.
posted by elephantsvanish at 2:09 PM on April 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Very rarely, and almost never with any real power. My current organization (a tech group that's part of a large government agency) has an ethics working group with a bit of power (mostly relationship power). That's about the most that I've seen or heard of.

I have some small hope that we're get there. There is an increasing recognition among engineers, both in the trenches and in leadership, that we need a stronger ethical foundation for our work.
posted by jacobian at 2:38 PM on April 3, 2018

Are such positions less likely to exist at startups and rapidly growing companies?

I've worked for a number of tech startups. There is absolutely zero chance you'd find one of these positions in a startup or small rapidly growing tech company. Headcount is the biggest expense for tech startups. Every person involved is going to be focused on getting the product out the door, marketing it, or bringing in funding; not on questioning whether the product should exist in the first place.

Which is not to say that that questioning doesn't happen -- the individual workers at tech startups have ethics and opinions, and generally have a much more direct ability to exercise those opinions than they would in a larger company. (I've seen engineers refuse to build a feature because it was too privacy-invasive, and I once put my foot down at a startup and told them if they wanted to switch to an advertising-based model they could start by hiring my replacement. It worked.) But you're never going to find a full or even part-time staff position devoted to it.
posted by ook at 2:57 PM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

By "it worked", I mean "the company didn't switch to an ad model, and within months ran out of money and we all walked away with nothing" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by ook at 3:10 PM on April 3, 2018

Here’s an article about people who are employed as data scientists working on ethical use of personal data. Doing ethics is just a part of their jobs.
posted by monotreme at 5:03 PM on April 3, 2018

My tech company does have an ethics board that is starting to have measurable influence on products. I am involved in these efforts, and feel positive about the way it's going.
posted by redlines at 7:54 PM on April 3, 2018

My tech company is a startup with about 200 employees, and they do have an equity specialist on staff, who leads projects focused on improving social equity for underprivileged groups. We're (definitely) not a non-profit, but we do have a market (and product) with an outsized chance to help the underprivileged.
posted by lostburner at 11:19 PM on April 3, 2018

Best answer: I’m an ethicist. There are hardly any jobs and the most common ones are not in tech or start ups. They tend to be where ethical oversight is a legislative requirement, eg i work in medical research. However, a lot of companies will include ethics content in their induction training or code of conduct or as part of their social responsibility strategy and will outsource this stuff to a presenter or someone who writes policy. Agree with rada above that often there is some compliance person who has ‘ethics’ in their job title but it’s really not a job about ethics.

People who analyse tech and other businesses for the ethics of what and how they do things are often academics, eg my PhD is on some ethical issues in the fertility industry and my supervisors are others who have looked at related issues. I chose the fertility industry precisely because, like chesty_a_arthur notes above, it’s close to some money and will have some value for me career wise. Most for profit organisations aren’t going to spend money thinking about things they won’t get a return on investment on.
posted by stellathon at 7:08 AM on April 4, 2018