We Need Chief Ethics Officers More Than Ever

"Never before in history have such a small number of designers – a handful of young, mostly male engineers, living in the Bay Area of California, working at a handful of tech companies – had such a large influence on two billion people's thoughts and choices." Those are the words of Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google and founder of Time Well Spent, a not-for-profit initiative to help educate businesses, users, and designers about morally acceptable technology design choices. However, he and the entire high-tech industry may not be going far enough, or fast enough. Take for instance Google, Tristan's former employer. Recently at their annual I/O conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated the company's "Duplex" technology nested within the Google Assistant project.