ETHICS
Is this tech’s seatbelt moment?
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Last year, when LinkedIn asked Luminary Labs CEO Sara Holoubek what topic to track in 2018, it was a no-brainer: ethics.
“The story I am watching in 2018 is whether we will see a return of ethics to business. We have seen CEOs ousted and corporate boards shuffled, but what has fundamentally changed inside of the organization? How have its values shifted? And what resources are going to be put into place to ensure that the deployment of new technologies and ways of working take into consideration the potential for unintended consequences?”
At the time, yellow flags were waving. In 2017, we watched as United, Wells Fargo, and Uber took hits when they failed to ask, “is this the right thing to do?”
By early 2018, the yellow flags had turned red. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica affair, the first pedestrian death from a self-driving car, and the exposure of secret military bases via open data are just a few examples of the importance of imagining unintended consequences of the future we are programming.
So where are we today? Omidyar Network’s Yoav Schlesinger recently reminded us that we are in a Ralph Nader “Unsafe at Any Speed” moment — businesses are finally hearing the rallying cry for tech seatbelts, and key stakeholders are starting to develop and test new frameworks to usher in a new era of tech safety.
In June, we shared five things executives and innovators could do to educate themselves and build a greater capacity for ethics. In the two months since, we’re encouraged to see the conversation shifting to include strategies and planning at the organizational and community level. This week on the Lab Report, we look at five trends and conversations that are gaining significant momentum.
Read more.
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All Tech is Human is planning a Summit on Ethical Tech in New York on October 20. The call for speakers, sponsors, and partners is open until Saturday: fill out the online form by August 18.
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Who gets to decide the names and boundaries of neighborhoods? Google Maps has become the primary arbiter of place names, and the company’s cartographers aren’t always getting it right.
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Voice assistants are still struggling to understand bilingual users.
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For $250, you can “biohack diabetes” with “an insulin-regulating system that combines a pump, a glucose monitor, a smartphone app, and this small Bluetooth-equipped computer.”
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“Soft skills” like empathy, collaboration, and creative thinking are increasingly valuable in the workplace. A combination of education and technology solutions may help humans learn to be more human.
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Speaking of upskilling: You can still vote for our SXSW EDU panel on using open source resources to transform adult education.
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The Center for an Urban Future is looking for a director of communications and strategy in New York.
The International Rescue Committee is searching for an innovation advisor and a podcast researcher at its headquarters in New York.
We’re hiring in New York, too! Please help us connect with a strategist, senior analyst, or analyst.
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Email Jessica Hibbard, managing editor: editor@luminary-labs.com.
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