The Ethical Dilemma at the Heart of Big Tech Companies

If it seems like every week there's a new scandal about ethics and the tech industry, it's not your imagination. Even as the tech industry is trying to establish concrete practices and institutions around tech ethics, hard lessons are being learned about the wide gap between the practices of "doing ethics" and what people think of as "ethical". This helps explain, in part, why it raises eyebrows when Google dissolves its short-lived AI ethics advisory board, in the face of public outcry about including a controversial alumnus of the Heritage Foundation on it, or when organized pressure from Google's engineering staff results in the cancellation of military contracts. This gap is important, because alongside these decidedly bad calls by those leading the charge for ethics in industry, we are also seeing the tech sector begin investing meaningful resources in the organizational capacity to identify, track, and mitigate the consequences of algorithmic technologies. We are at a point where it would seem that the academics and critics who had exhorted the industry to make such considerations for decades should be declaring a small victory.