Making Hard Choices: The Quest for Ethics in Machine Learning

In Silicon Valley, many companies aspire to the ideal of an ethical company. You can see this in company mottos, such as "Don't Be Evil," or in the social responsibility efforts espoused by many peer tech companies. On a deeper level, though, the behavior of companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others is increasingly governed by the machine-learned systems they build to run their businesses. These companies are now starting to ask themselves how they can make an informed decision about how they operate their machine learning systems in an ethical manner, instead of being driven solely by revenue or some more abstract success metric. But we, as developers, are not off the hook.