Monthly Archives: July 2022

If it seems like every week theres a new scandal about ethics and the tech industry, its 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 Googles 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. Yet in many cases, those same outside voices are raising a vigorous round of objections to the tech industrys choices, often with good reason. While just a few years ago, it seemed everyone shared an understanding of what was meant by ethics in the tech industry, now that ethics is a site of power, who gets to determine the meaning and practices of ethics is being hotly contested.

In Silicon Valley, however, it is unclear what all of this means, particularly when it comes to translating ethical principles into the practical necessities and language of business. Is tech ethics just the pursuit of robust processes? What are tech ethicists goals, and what is their theory of change? Is any of this work measurable in the frameworks companies already use to account for value? How much does ethics add to the cost of doing business, and what is the difference for companies that are just starting up, racing toward IPO, or already household names?

Building fair and equitable machine learning systems.

To find out, we along with co-author of the study, danah boyd (who prefers lowercase letters in her name) studied those doing the work of ethics inside of companies, whom we call ethics owners, to find out what they see as their task at hand. Owner is common parlance inside of flat corporate structures, meaning someone who is responsible for coordinating a domain of work across the different units of an organization. Our research interviewing this new class of tech industry professionals shows that their work is, tentatively and haltingly, becoming more concrete through both an attention to process and a concern with outcomes. We learned that people in these new roles encounter an important set of tensions that are fundamentally not resolvable. Ethical issues are never solved, they are navigated and negotiated as part of the work of ethics owners.

The central challenge ethics owners are grappling with is negotiating between external pressures to respond to ethical crises at the same time that they must be responsive to the internal logics of their companies and the industry. On the one hand, external criticisms push them toward challenging core business practices and priorities. On the other hand, the logics of Silicon Valley, and of business more generally, create pressures to establish or restore predictable processes and outcomes that still serve the bottom line.

We identified three distinct logics that characterize this tension between internal and external pressures:

Meritocracy: Although originally coined as a derisive term in satirical science fiction by British sociologist Michael Young, meritocracy infuses everything in Silicon Valley from hiring practices to policy positions, and retroactively justifies the industrys power in our lives. As such, ethics is often framed with an eye toward smarter, better, and faster approaches, as if the problems of the tech industry can be addressed through those virtues. Given this, it is not surprising that many within the tech industry position themselves as the actors best suited to address ethical challenges, rather than less technically-inclined stakeholders, including elected officials and advocacy groups. In our interviews, this manifested in relying on engineers to use their personal judgement by grappling with the hard questions on the ground, trusting them to discern and to evaluate the ethical stakes of their own products. While there are some rigorous procedures that help designers scan for the consequences of their products, sitting in a room and thinking hard about the potential harms of a product in the real world is not the same as thoroughly understanding how someone (whose life is very different than a software enginee) might be affected by things like predictive policing or facial recognition technology, as obvious examples. Ethics owners find themselves being pulled between technical staff that assert generalized competence over many domains and their own knowledge that ethics is a specialized domain that requires deep contextual understanding.

Market fundamentalism: Although it is not the case that tech companies will choose profit over social good in every instance, it is the case that the organizational resources necessary for morality to win out need to be justified in market-friendly terms. As a senior leader in a research division explained, this means that the system that you create has to be something that people feel adds value and is not a massive roadblock that adds no value, because if it is a roadblock that has no value, people literally wont do it, because they dont have to. In the end, the market sets the terms of the debate, even if maximum profit is not the only acceptable outcome. Ethics owners therefore must navigate between avoiding measurable downside risks and promoting the upside benefits of more ethical AI. Arguing against releasing a product before it undergoes additional testing for racial or gender bias, or in order to avoid a potential lawsuit, is one thing. Arguing that the more extensive testing will lead to greater sales numbers is something else. Both are important, but one fits squarely inside the legal and compliance team, the other fits better in product teams.

Technological solutionism: The idea that all problems have tractable technical fixes has been reinforced by the rewards the industry has reaped for producing technology that they believe does solve problems. As such, the organizational practices that facilitate technical success are often ported over to ethics challenges. This is manifested in the search for checklists, procedures, and evaluative metrics that could break down messy questions of ethics into digestible engineering work. This optimism is counterweighted by a concern that, even when posed as a technical question, ethics becomes intractable, like its too big of a problem to tackle.This tension is on stark display in addressing bias and unfairness in AI; there are dozens of solutions for fixing algorithmic bias through complex statistical methods, but less work on addressing the underlying bias in data collection or in the real world that that data is collected from. And even for a fair algorithm, fairness is only a subset of ethical questions about a product. What good is fairness if it only leads to a less biased set of people harmed by a dangerous product?

Our research shows that even if they are all engaged in some form of critique of it, the collective goal of ethics owners is not to stop the tech industry. They, like the engineers they work alongside, are enmeshed in organizational cultures that reward metric-oriented and fast-paced work with more resources. This ratchets up the pressure to fit in and ratchets down the capacity to object, which makes it all the more difficult to distinguish between success and failure moral victories can look like punishment while ethically questionable products earn big bonuses. The tensions that arise from this must be worked through, with one eye on process, certainly, but also with the other eye squarely focused on outcomes, both short- and long-term, both inside and outside companies, and as both employees and members of a much broader society.

We saw these tensions when the co-founder of the Stanford Human-Centered AI (HAI) Institute, the renowned AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, became notorious while working at Google for warning in a leaked email that Googlers should not publicly discuss the role of their AI products in constructing a system for facial analysis on military drones. Rather than using her considerable sway advocating against the military contract for obviously ethically-troubling technology, Li argued to colleagues that discussing Project Maven publicly would lead to damaging the positive image they had cultivated through talk of humanistic AI.

Similarly, when human rights legal scholar Philip Alston said from the 2018 AI Now symposium stage, half-jokingly, I want to strangle ethics, he was not implying that he wishes people and companies to be less ethical, but rather that ethics as opposed to a human rights legal framework, for example is typically approached as a non-normative, open-ended, undefined and unaccountable endeavor focused on achieving a robust process rather than a substantive outcome. Oddly enough, Alstons take on ethics is copacetic with Lis: ethics as a series of processes appears to not need to make substantive commitments to just outcomes.

For better or worse, the parameters of those processes will drive future administrative regulations, algorithmic accountability documentation, investment priorities, and human resource decisions. When we collectively debate how to manage the consequences of digital technologies, we should include more of the perspective of people whose labor is shaping this part of our futures.

Excerpt from:

The Ethical Dilemma at the Heart of Big Tech Companies

The United States is widely acknowledged to be in a period of profound political polarization. Virtually every facet of domestic policy is a source of friction between the major parties.

However, on matters of national security, something approaching a national consensus still exists. Both parties favor robust military spending, suppression of Islamic terrorists, strengthening NATO and countering Chinas moves to displace America as the dominant global power.

Despite bipartisan support, though, Washingtons efforts to contain a rising China are not going well. One reason is that Chinas power, unlike Russias, is grounded in robust economic performance.

Chinas growth rate has routinely surpassed that of other industrialized countries for decades, and it now commands more manufacturing capacity than the U.S., Germany and Japan combined.

Many of the top-priority technologies the Pentagon has identified for the future are commercial ... [+] innovations that companies like Google and Microsoft have pioneered.

For instance, China out-produces the U.S. in steel by as much as ten-to-one in some years, and was well on its way to wiping out the domestic aluminum smelting industry before the Trump administration imposed tariffs on state-subsidized Chinese exports.

China has proven adept at dominating new industries widely deemed critical to the future global economy, from lithium-ion batteries to solar panels to wind turbines.

The United States still dominates in some sectors such as aerospace, but the overall impression, confirmed by numerous public and private assessments, is that America is losing ground.

Beijing is leveraging its dynamic economy to become a much bigger military player than it was in the past, particularly in its immediate neighborhood, but the core of the challenge remains economic and technological in character.

If Washington cannot prevail on that playing field, then no amount of military expenditure will prevent it from falling behind China in the race for global influence.

Against that backdrop, the rising tide of regulation aimed at U.S. tech companies is at best a mixed blessing, and potentially a hindrance to staying on top.

I am referring mainly to the biggest tech companiesAmazon AMZN , Apple AAPL , Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft MSFT which have become the target of numerous legislative initiatives aimed at curbing behavior deemed to be monopolistic.

It is not necessary to resolve the debate over what constitutes monopolistic behavior in the digital era to recognize that these five companies have an outsized impact on Americas ability to keep ahead of China.

The Boston Consulting Group issues an annual ranking of the worlds most innovative companies, and the most recent lists the top four innovators as (1) Apple, (2) Alphabet, (3) Amazon, and (4) Microsoft. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is somewhat further down the list, but still rates as one of the top-twenty innovators worldwide.

This matters to national security because every informed observer agrees that the key to competing globally is the pace at which a nation innovates. Innovation in this case doesnt just mean being inventive, it means bringing new products to the market and shaping the content of demand. All of the companies in the Boston Consulting Groups compendium of innovators are accomplished at doing this.

Consider Alphabet, the parent company of Google GOOG . It captures about 90% of global search traffic and its Android operating system is used on 75% of the worlds smart phones. Google Maps is tapped by 70% of navigation app users each month, and its Chrome browser attracts 66% of browser usage worldwide.

And that is just the tip of the Google iceberg. The Nature Index rates it as one of the top five generators of scientific papers in the life sciences, when measured in terms of the impact its research creates. Googles impact on innovation, both at home and abroad, is huge.

This is not the first time in American history that private industry has been crucial to national security. During the Second World War Raytheon played a pivotal role in supplying game-changing radar to the Allied powers. A generation later, AT&T Bell Labs was chosen to oversee the national missile-defense system because of its unique ability to manage large technology projects.

What makes the role of innovation in national security different today is that most of the technologies the Pentagon considers top-priority for the future are primarily commercial in nature.

Among the most important technologies are microelectronics, 5G communications, biotechnology, digital networking, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

These are all areas in which Big Tech companies like Google are deeply engaged. Indeed, it is their very size that enables the scale of innovation in which they engage. Smaller enterprises cant afford the depth of effort or the degree of risk that such companies frequently assume.

This is of no great concern to the European Parliament, which on Tuesday passed legislation to rein in the biggest tech players, because Europe is a laggard in the digital arena. None of its digital enterprises begins to approach the scale of an Amazon or Meta.

However, it matters a lot to the United States, where most of the worlds leading online enterprises are headquartered. If Europes digital regulations become a roadmap for U.S. rules, as the Wall Street Journal suggests may happen, that could hobble the most powerful sources of innovation in the American economy.

Although U.S. lawmakers have been contemplating a raft of legislative initiatives to rein in, constrain or break up the biggest U.S. tech companies, there is little evidence such laws would accomplish much more than increase cost and confusion for consumers. After all, it is common practice for the companies in question to offer their services for free, or at least at the lowest price possible.

The downside, obviously, is that tighter regulation could diminish the ability of the nations leading innovators to keep innovating at their current pace. The fallout wouldnt be confined just to the top half-dozen companies: it would ripple across the entire digital sphere, an arena in which the majority of startup innovators hope eventually to be acquired by one of the big players.

There are valid reasons for regulating Big Tech, ranging from the protection of privacy to barring illegal content to preventing anti-competitive behavior.

However, without a rigorous assessment of how reining in Big Tech might impact the overall performance of the tech sector, it is an open question who would benefit more from new U.S. regulationsconsumers, competitors, or China.

At the very least, any new U.S. regulations should be treating the likes of TikTok and Alibaba the same way Washington treats its own innovators, otherwise we may simply be helping Beijing in its quest for global dominance.

Some of the companies mentioned above have been occasional contributors to my think tank.

See the article here:

Why Reining In Big Tech Could Be Bad News For US National Security - Forbes

The potential gold standard for online content governance in the EUthe Digital Services Actis now a reality after the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly for the legislation earlier this week. The final hurdle, a mere formality, is for the European Council of Ministers to sign off on the text in September.

The good news is that the landmark legislation includes some of the most extensive transparency and platform accountability obligations to date. It will give users real control over and insight into the content they engage with, and offer protections from some of the most pervasive and harmful aspects of our online spaces.

The focus now turns to implementation, as the European Commission begins in earnest to develop the enforcement mechanisms. The proposed regime is a complex structure in which responsibilities are shared between the European Commission and national regulators, in this case known as Digital Services Coordinators (DSCs). It will rely heavily on the creation of new roles, expansion of existing responsibilities, and seamless cooperation across borders. Whats clear is that as of now, there simply isnt the institutional capacity to enact this legislation effectively.

In a sneak peek, the commission has provided a glimpse into how they propose to overcome some of the more obvious challenges to implementationlike how they plan to supervise large online platforms and how they will attempt to avoid the problems that plague the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), such as out-of-sync national regulators and selective enforcement. But their proposal only raises new questions. A huge number of new staff will need to be hired and a new European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency will need to attract world-class data scientists and experts to aid in the enforcement of the new algorithmic transparency and data accessibility obligations. The Commissions preliminary vision is to organize its regulatory responsibilities by thematic areas, including a societal issues team, which will be tasked with oversight over some of the novel due diligence obligations. Insufficient resourcing here is a cause for concern and would ultimately risk turning these hard-won obligations into empty tick-box exercises.

One critical example is the platforms obligation to conduct assessments to address systemic risks on their services. This is a complex process that will need to take into account all the fundamental rights protected under the EU Charter. In order to do this, tech companies will have to develop human rights impact assessments (HRIAs)an evaluation process meant to identify and mitigate potential human rights risks stemming from a service or business, in this case a platformsomething civil society urged them to do throughout the negotiations. It will, however, be up to the board, made up of the DSCs and chaired by the commission, to annually assess the most prominent systemic risks identified and outline best practices for mitigation measures. As someone who has contributed to developing and assessing HRIAs, I know that this will be no easy feat, even with independent auditors and researchers feeding into the process.

If they are to make an impact, the assessments need to establish comprehensive baselines, concrete impact analyses, evaluation procedures, and stakeholder engagement strategies. The very best HRIAs embed a gender-sensitive approach and pay specific attention to systemic risks that will disproportionately impact those from historically marginalized communities.

This is the most concrete method for ensuring all potential rights violations are included.

Luckily the international human rights framework, such as the UN Guiding Principles on Human Rights, offers guidance on how best to develop these assessments. Nonetheless, the success of the provision will depend on how platforms interpret and invest in these assessments, and even more so on how well the commission and national regulators will enforce these obligations. But at current capacity, the ability of the institutions to develop guidelines and best practices and to evaluate mitigation strategies is nowhere near the scale the DSA will require.

Continued here:

Europe's Big Tech Law Is Approved. Now Comes the Hard Part - WIRED

Americans are treating tech companies like a substitute for effective representative government. It shouldnt be this way.

After the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, many abortion rights advocates turned their attention to how peoples digital bread crumbs from apps and the internet might incriminate them if they seek the procedure, and what technology and telecom companies like Facebook, Apple and Verizon could do to protect them.

This was understandable. In our data-hogging economy, companies have information on nearly everyone. That makes them potential sources for law enforcers seeking to prosecute those involved in abortions.

On the other hand, it was another example of people bypassing elected officials and looking instead to powerful tech companies to address their anxieties about law, policy and accountability.

Many people believe that Donald Trump and other Republican officials wont stop making false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. So a lot of attention has focused on what Twitter, Facebook or YouTube might do to stop those lies from spreading.

Politicians are upset that some large corporations dont pay any federal income taxes, but instead of changing the legal deductions and exemptions, they yell at Amazon and other big companies for not paying their fair share of taxes. People are angry about Facebooks lenient enforcement of rules banning gun sales but there are more gun restrictions on Facebook than in much of real-world America.

Corporations are a major force in our lives, and a few digital superpowers act like consequential global actors, at times on par with governments. They have a responsibility beyond profits, whether any of us like it or not.

But its also strange to both worry that Big Tech has too much power and sometimes demand that the companies fix what we dont like about the world. Corporate action is not a substitute for effective government.

(For more on the limits of corporate social responsibility, read this piece from Emily Stewart at Vox and this one by Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of The New York Times editorial board.)

I understand why this happens: Many Americans arent confident that the government is capable of effectively addressing big problems such as public safety, health care and climate change. Companies are often more accountable and responsive to peoples demands than our elected leaders are.

Its also true that tech companies including Facebook have fought off government regulation while also saying that its needed to fix problems that they helped create.

I keep thinking about a conversation I had a couple of years ago with Zephyr Teachout, a leftist lawyer who is now a special adviser to the New York attorney general, about the historical aberration of people who are now petitioning companies for social and political change.

We discussed a mass protest in Britain at the turn of the 19th century that Teachout has written about. Protesters angry that sugar producers were using enslaved people demanded that the government abolish slavery not that the companies change their behavior.

Americans lack of faith in government creates odd spectacles. The concerns about corporate data being used in legal cases involving abortion and fear about Chinas government harnessing Americans data from the TikTok app could be a nudge to elected leaders and the public. We could have national restrictions in the U.S. on what data companies collect on us, and change how easy it is for companies to sell or share that data with just about anyone.

Google said last week that it would begin to delete location information when people visit certain sensitive places such as addiction treatment facilities and abortion providers. TikToks parent company, based in China, has tried to wall off the app from Chinas digital borders.

Americas lax restrictions on data havent changed yet. But TikToks and Googles have.

The internet can be darn great sometimes! Our On Tech editor, Hanna Ingber, watched as her kiddo unleashed his amazing taste for interiors. We want to hear from you about how technology has been a window into personal discovery or joy:

My 8-year-old son was recently playing around on his Chromebook from the days of remote school and stumbled upon a design app. I allowed him to download it, and he designed his first living room. And then he wanted to design more and more.

A friend told me her son had been playing around on Google and learned about an upcoming convention for those who like to do origami; he asked his mother about it, and she took him to it. It was mostly adults there but he had a blast.

These experiences made me think about how the internet can open worlds for children beyond what their parents had considered or knew existed.

Wed like to hear from you, our On Tech readers, about a recent experience with tech that helped you or your family broaden your horizons. Please share your stories with us by emailing ontech@nytimes.com, and put tech wonders in the subject line. We may publish a selection in an upcoming newsletter.

Start-up money is going into hiding: Investments in U.S. tech start-ups have dropped 23 percent over the past three months. It is the first decline in funding since 2019, my colleague Erin Griffith reported, and another sign of the freeze in money flowing in and out of young companies.

The internets dollar store has lost its touch: Wish grabbed the hearts of shoppers and some investors who bet that the companys cheap tchotchkes would make it an e-commerce superstar. But plastering the internet with ads for Wish products stopped working, and the company sometimes used deceptive experiments that drove customers away, my colleagues Tiffany Hsu and Sapna Maheshwari wrote.

Can you identify a country by the color of its soil? My colleague Kellen Browning wrote about people who take a glimpse at a random place in the world using Google Street View and guess as fast as possible what country its in. The best players can identify a location in seconds or less.

At a county fair in southwest Virginia, one woman won over 25 categories in a competition, including for best sauerkraut, jelly, jam and pie, and the top three places for cookies. People wouldnt rest until they had found her.

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else youd like us to explore. You can reach us at ontech@nytimes.com.

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Read this article:

Tech Is Not Representative Government - The New York Times

There is a growing push and pull between Big Tech and the state over the governance of global public platforms. A few days ago, social media platform, Twitter, moved the Karnataka High Court over the governments orders to block certain tweets and handles under Section 69 of the Information Technology Act 2000. Twitters move came after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had asked it to comply with its orders or risk losing the safe harbour protection afforded to such platforms. This clash between big tech and the state is, however, not unique to India. Across the world, governments are grappling with this issue, struggling to arrive at a new equilibrium. Regulation of social media platforms public forums but owned by corporations is a contentious issue.

Twitter has alleged that the blocking orders are procedurally and substantially non-compliant with Section 69A, are manifestly arbitrary, fail to provide the originators prior notice and are disproportionate in several cases. In its petition, the social media giant has also argued that some of the URLs contain political and journalistic content, blocking which would be a violation of the right to free speech. However, Twitters past actions the manner, for instance, in which it suddenly cut the mic of Donald Trump lend credence to the charge that it is unaccountable. Its content moderation decisions can be accused of being shrouded in opacity, and/or taken by executives in Silicon Valley whose incentives are not aligned with what may be deemed as public interest. Considering the power of such platforms in shaping public opinion, these are matters of concern. Elon Musks takeover attempt he has now pulled out of buying Twitter would have compounded the problem. A privately owned company is under lesser public scrutiny as compared to a publicly listed one.

Yet, by asking Twitter to block tweets and handles, governments may be seeking to suppress views critical of them. According to Twitters global transparency report, the fourth highest number of content takedown requests came from India between January and June 2021. As reported in this paper, between February 2021 and 2022, MeitY issued 10 blocking orders, asking Twitter to take down 1,400 accounts and 175 tweets. Governments need to be more transparent in their decision-making. Since the issue has reached the courts, there is hope that, at the very least, the judiciary will help clarify the terms of engagement.

UPSC Key |The Indian Express helps you prepare for the Civil Services and other competitive exams with cues on how to read and understand content.

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In battle between big tech and state, more clarity is needed, both sides have much to uncover and declare - The Indian Express