Ethics Alone Can’t Fix Big Tech
Ethics can provide blueprints for good tech, but it can’t implement them.
"Ethics requires more than rote compliance. And it’s important
to remember that industry can reduce any strategy to theater. Simply focusing on law and policy won’t solve these problems, since they are equally (if not more) susceptible to watering down. Many are rightly excited about new proposals for state and federal privacy legislation, and for laws constraining facial recognition technology, but we’re already seeing industry lobbying to strip them
of their most meaningful provisions. More importantly, law and policy
evolve too slowly to keep up with the latest challenges technology
throws at us, as is evident from the fact that most existing federal
privacy legislation is older than the internet.
The way forward is to see these strategies as complementary,
each offering distinctive and necessary tools for steering new and
emerging technologies toward shared ends. The task is fitting them
together.
By its very nature ethics is idealistic. The purpose of
ethical reflection is to understand how we ought to live—which
principles should drive us and which rules should constrain us. However,
it is more or less indifferent to the vagaries of market forces and
political winds. To oversimplify: Ethics can provide blueprints for good
tech, but it can’t implement them. In contrast, law and policy are
creatures of the here and now. They aim to shape the future, but they
are subject to the brute realities—social, political, economic,
historical—from which they emerge. What they lack in idealism, though,
is made up for in effectiveness. Unlike ethics, law and policy are
backed by the coercive force of the state."
