I Was Wrong about the Ethics Crisis

The ethics crisis in computing was “launched” in 2018. In March of that year, The Boston Globe asserted, “Computer science faces an ethics crisis. The Cambridge Analytica scandal proves it!” This was in response to the Techlash,^a where Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan described Silicon Valley executives as “moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength” and Niall Ferguson, a Hoover Institution historian, described cyberspace as “cyberia, a dark and lawless realm where malevolent actors range.”

But in my January 2019 Communications column,^b I dismissed the ethical-crisis vibe. I wrote, “If society finds the surveillance business model offensive, then the remedy is public policy, in the form of laws and regulations, rather than an ethics outrage.” I now think, however, I was wrong. I think I was right to advocate for laws and regulation to address the adverse impacts of computing, but I now believe we do have an ethics crisis in computing.

What changed my mind? First, my anxiety about the ills brought on by computing has risen dramatically, as a perusal of my column over the past five years shows.^c I bemoaned that humanity seems to be serving technology rather than the other way around. I argued that tech corporations have become too powerful and their power must be curtailed. I asked that ACM dedicate itself to the public good. I pointed out that Big Tech’s business models are unethical. I explained how technology increases societal polarization. I wailed that computing has blood on its hands. About two years ago, I started giving talks^d on how to be an ethical computing technologist.

But I have yet, until now, to point at the elephant in the room and ask whether it is ethical to work for Big Tech, taking all of the above into consideration. ACM’s Code of Ethics^e does offer a clear ethical guideline. It opens with the following sentences: “Computing professionals’ actions change the world. To act responsibly, they should reflect upon the wider impacts of their work, consistently supporting the public good.” So, the ethical star we should follow is the support of the public good.

Supporting the public good is not always straightforward. All of us must navigate the trade-off between “me” and “we.” A famous Talmudic quote states: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others, including the public good. So how does working for Big Tech thread this needle? This is the question that people who work for Big Tech must ask themselves.

The profit motive is not inherently against the public good. As Adam Smith pointed out, “They are led by an invisible hand…and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.” But the belief in the magical power of the free market always to serve the public good has no theoretical basis.^f In fact, our current climate crisis is a demonstrated market failure.^g To take an extreme example, Big Tobacco surely does not support the public good, and most of us would agree that it is unethical to work for Big Tobacco. The question, thus, is whether Big Tech is supporting the public good, and if not, what should Big Tech workers do about it.

Of course, there is no simple answer to such a question, and the only reasonable answer to the question of whether it is ethical to work for Big Tech is, “It depends.” But consider Uber. In 2023, Wired magazine reported^h that “…Travis Kalanick, had built an enormous, enthusiastic user base by subsidizing rides with the company’s vast reservoir of VC funding. Under Kalanick, Uber skirted regulations, shrugged off safety issues, and presided over a workplace rife with sexual harassment.” Was it ethical to have worked at Uber under Kalanick? I am sure many Uber employees were not aware of Kalanick’s shenanigans, but many were, and yet they continued to work at Uber. It was only in 2022 that a whistleblower leaked more than 124,000 company files to the Guardian, exposing its misdeeds.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” said the writer and political activist Upton Sinclair. By and large, Big Tech workers do not seem to be asking themselves hard questions, I believe, hence my conclusion that we do indeed suffer from an ethics crisis.