Exploring the Tech Sector....... More and more Moorestown Friends School alumni are carving out careers in the tech sector, an area of endeavor that is continuously posing new ethical challenges. “We hope that the way we encourage students to be attentive to their moral compasses throughout their years at MFS will help them navigate the amazing world of technology,” said Associate Head of School and Academic Dean Meredith Godley. “They will face unimaginable questions, relating to everything from cybersecurity to privacy to artificial intelligence and beyond.” Macalester College Professor Diane Michelfelder ’71 is a world-renowned pioneer in the intersection of modern technology and ethics. A special focus of her work is on ethical issues related to Internet-embedded design. A past president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, she is an alumna of Bryn Mawr College with a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. We asked Dr. Michelfelder to reflect on the questions that face this generation as they take leadership in a rapidly transforming landscape, and how Quaker values might be brought to bear on digital ethics. Following her piece, enjoy reading profiles of five alumni in the heart of the tech sector. I’ve taught Digital Ethics under different names and with different content for over three decades now; it never grows old because there is always something new to learn and new technologies to think about with an eye to their ethical impacts. When I first started teaching this course while a member of the philosophy department at Cal Poly, there were only a handful of university courses on the topic. The fact that I was teaching a course in the ethics of the Internet prompted one website to dub me as a “CyberEthics pioneer.” Back then, the questions my students and I talked about largely had to do with the impact of the Internet on issues connected to U.S. rights: freedom of expression, privacy, intellectual property, etc. The course assumed an Internet user was sitting at a desk looking into a monitor. If we fast-forward to 2021, we find that the Internet user has been transformed into a mobile-device connected subject, and that the Digital Ethics syllabus is bursting with an abundance of new issues to consider and debate: dataveillance; algorithmic transparency, fairness and justice; the responsibilities of social media companies with regard to platform content moderation; and ethical issues involving wearable computers, robotics, self-driving cars, and “smart” cities. These topics reflect a much different world from the previous world in which the idioms of “cyberspace” and “the new frontier” were common parlance. In the contemporary digital world, often even the experts don’t always know how things work, and our attention is tempted to stop at the exciting
Fall 2021
Diane Michelfelder ’71 St. Paul, MN
• Professor of Philosophy, Macalester College • Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin • A.B., Bryn Mawr College
services Internet-enabled digital devices provide us (think Siri or Fitbit), rather than wondering what is going on behind the scenes and how many actors are gathering information about us. Right now, there is a huge need for tech industry workers who can advocate for the protection of human rights in this environment and push for changes so that the vectors of digital development shift more toward uplifting our collective flourishing and well-being. Such work, aimed beyond Google’s unofficial motto “do no evil” to genuinely trying in the Quakerinspired way to improve our life in common with others so that we all could flourish, could be done in a variety of roles: machine learning engineer, design ethicist, data scientist; AI (artificial intelligence) ethics researcher, chief ethics officer, and the like. When I advise my students double-majoring in philosophy and computer science, I stress how they are preparing themselves well for future employment. More and more tech companies are recognizing for instance that the algorithms they develop are not value-neutral but can contain direct or proxy biases that lead to unjust outcomes for members of underrepresented groups. They are recognizing that it can be more efficient to deliberately design user-centered values into products at the development stage rather than inventing new products for invention’s sake alone and releasing them quickly onto the market even if there isn’t a specific need for them (think flying taxis, for example). They are recognizing that users might value the privacy of their personal information higher than they (the companies) anticipated. Of course, when some companies tout their interests in ethics it is more for the sake of show than of substance. But “ethics washing” may be on the wane as public awareness of and pushback against it grows. Just to take one example, until this year, a significant part of an applicant’s score when interviewed by a business using HireVue
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