Ethical Dilemmas Reveal Technology's Hidden Value Systems
- Ethical dilemmas are built into the technology from the start because every technological design embeds specific assumptions about what matters.
- Take facial recognition systems.
- The ethical dilemma isn't just about privacy versus security, it's about whose faces the system can actually recognize accurately.
- Early facial recognition systems were trained primarily on white male faces, making them significantly less accurate for women and people of color.
- This isn't a misuse of the technology but a direct result of whose knowledge was prioritized during development.
Tip
The communities that build technology determine whose knowledge gets embedded in the system and whose gets excluded.
Algorithmic Content Curation Shapes Democratic Knowledge
- Social media algorithms show you content you might like while also actively shaping what you think is worth knowing about.
- This creates ethical dilemmas beyond simple echo chambers.
- The ethical dilemma is about how the algorithm embeds a particular theory of democracy, one that values emotional engagement over informed deliberation.
Example
- During the 2020 U.S. election, TikTok's algorithm amplified videos about voting irregularities because they generated high engagement through outrage and concern.
- Meanwhile, videos explaining actual voting procedures received less distribution because they were less emotionally engaging.
- The algorithm didn't intend to spread misinformation, but its design prioritized engagement over accuracy.
Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost?
- Strong ethical analysis of technology identifies not just intended benefits but hidden cost distributions.
- Take contact tracing apps during COVID-19.
- Public health officials promoted these as tools for collective benefit, helping track disease spread to protect everyone.
- But the apps worked by collecting location and proximity data from smartphone users.
- This created different risk profiles for different communities.
- People with jobs requiring physical presence, service workers, healthcare staff, delivery drivers, generated more trackable data than people who could work from home.
Hint
The ethical dilemma reveals how technological solutions to collective problems can redistribute risks in ways that reinforce existing inequalities.
Transparency Paradoxes
- When we demand transparency in technological systems, we often discover paradoxes.
- Making algorithms more explainable can sometimes make them more exploitable.
Example
- Algorithmic hiring tools face a similar transparency paradox.
- When companies publish their diversity hiring algorithms to demonstrate fairness, job applicants can optimize their applications to trigger the algorithm's diversity preferences without genuinely addressing workplace inclusion.
- Transparency intended to promote fairness can sometimes undermine it.
Safeguards Create New Vulnerabilities
- Most discussions of technological ethics focus on implementing safeguards: regulations, oversight mechanisms, ethical review boards.
- But safeguards themselves create new ethical dilemmas because they embed particular assumptions about what needs protecting.
Example
- Facebook's automated content moderation system frequently removes posts from Palestinian activists documenting human rights violations because the content includes images of violence that trigger the platform's safety algorithms.
- The safeguard designed to protect users from harmful content ends up suppressing legitimate political documentation.
- The ethical framework embedded in the moderation algorithm prioritizes psychological safety over political transparency.
Technology Embeds Theories of Knowledge
- Every technological system embeds implicit theories about how knowledge should work.
- Search engines embed theories about relevance and authority.
- Recommendation systems embed theories about preference and choice.
- Medical diagnostic AI embeds theories about symptom patterns and disease classification.
Common Mistake
- Avoid the neutrality assumption.
- Don't treat technological ethical dilemmas as problems that can be solved by making technology more neutral.
- Technology is never neutral, it always embeds someone's values and assumptions about knowledge.
- The ethical question is really whose values get embedded and who gets to decide.
Exam technique
- Strong ethical analysis avoids simple solutions like "more regulation" or "better transparency."
- Instead, it examines how technological systems structure knowledge in ways that create winners and losers, often in ways that weren't intended by the designers.
Self review
- Can you identify a technology you use regularly where the ethical dilemmas reveal embedded assumptions about whose knowledge matters most?
- Think of a technological safeguard that's meant to protect people. What new vulnerabilities or inequalities might that safeguard create?
- How do the ethical dilemmas surrounding a particular technology reveal different theories about what knowledge should prioritize?
