In a continually advancing world, it is becoming ever more difficult for people to carve out their own niche. The internet revolutionized connection and communication globally, providing near-instant access to oceans of information. The rise of robotics and artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous and has contaminated domains ranging from manufacturing and stock market trading to medical diagnostics and surveillance. Each of these uses has its boon, but also its drawbacks. Issues like privacy rights emerge when we talk about facial recognition systems in public and the ethics of contact and tracing apps in this new age of pandemics. Issues like the right to employment become questioned as robotic process automation becomes more attractive to employers than human laborers. What happens when we get so used to these apps that privacy becomes a thing of the past? What happens when to those people who are displaced from their jobs by robots? These are tough questions that the folks at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) have been tackling for over a decade.
The IEET is a nonprofit think tank that promotes ideas about how technological progress can increase freedom, happiness, and human flourishing in democratic societies. Their work is premised on the idea that technological progress can be a catalyst for positive human development so long as we ensure that technologies are safe and equitably distributed. This position is what they call a “technoprogressive” orientation.
Composed of more than 40 fellows and affiliates from all over the globe, the IEET aims to build a global technoprogressive ideological current, focusing on defining the technoprogressive approach to public policy in the United States and around the world. Focusing on emerging technologies that have the potential to positively transform social conditions and the quality of human lives – especially “human enhancement technologies” – the IEET seeks to cultivate an academic, professional, and popular understanding of their implications, both positive and negative, and to encourage responsible public policies for their safe and equitable use.
Incorporated in 2004, the IEET has recently announced their first postdoctoral fellowship in the Future of Work at the University of Massachusetts Boston in partnership with the university’s Applied Ethics Center (AEC). The Future of Work Fellow will help the AEC and the IEET research the academic and policy work being done to help address some of the ethical issues raised above. This is just one of the projects that the IEET is currently working on. To explore these issues further, we sat down with the IEET’s Managing Director Steven Umbrello.
Interview with Steven Umbrello
When and how did you get involved with the IEET?
I got involved with the IEET back in 2015. At the time, I was still doing my undergrad in philosophy and classical civilizations at the University of Toronto. I know it seems strange at first glance that I would get involved with a think tank devoted to technology with that background, but my philosophical interests were always technical-based.
I recall reaching out to the then Managing Director Hank Pellissier who asked me to join the team as the Assistant Managing Director after reading some of my writings. About a year later, Hank dedicated most of his time to new projects, and I assumed his role as the Managing Director of the institute.
What does your role involve?
The IEET has had some substantial changes over the years. We have had numerous projects in the past that have had a mixed reception. We were always in the business of promoting techno-forward interests and the works of others. My primary job was coordinating with our fellows and affiliates and supporting their work in relation to the IEET. Besides that, I conduct research, which is primarily on how we can design technologies for human values, rather than sidelining them as afterthoughts.
Regardless, 2021 has provided to me a favorable year for the IEET. With new funding coming in, given the increased interest in the ethical impacts of technologies on society, the IEET is well situated as the vanguard of tackling these issues. We have just announced our first postdoctoral fellowship on the ‘future of work’ and a Doctoral Dissertation Award for ongoing dissertation work that focuses on promoting technoprogressivism.
Can you talk more about your work on designing for human values?
Sure. Typically technology has been conceived of in at least three different ways. People understand technology by talking about it as if it was just a tool or instrument. We have all heard the classic NRA phrase “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” This is called the instrumentalist view of technology. The second way is by saying that technology is so powerful that it cannot be controlled; it “can’t kill progress.” This is the technological determinist view of technology; that technology determines society. The third way people often talk about technology is that it is purely the subject of social construction. Each of these positions is correct in certain ways. But I take another stance, that of the interactional stance on technology. The interactional stance is that technology and society co-create one another. This means that technology and society both support and constrain certain designs and certain outcomes and thus certain values that we find to be important.
We all know the impacts that transformative technologies can have on society. Things like artificial intelligence systems are already proving to the harmful in certain ways. Misdiagnosing patients, racial discrimination in biased facial recognition systems, and unfair hiring PR systems, to name a few. Many of these issues arise because designers are more often than naught focused on efficiency and economic gain. These values are important, but not at the opportunity cost of other human values like safety, privacy, accountability, autonomy, and many others. My work looks at how designers can begin to think about designing for these important human values rather than waiting for something to go wrong. We can’t afford to wait until things go awry before we realize what was always already important!
So how can designers actually go about making this change?
There are a host of design approaches that designers can adopt to begin thinking about human values in design. I am partisan to an approach called value-sensitive design, or VSD for short. This approach is a principled approach to design that allows designers to consider what important human values are at play, how the technology can support and/or constrain those values, who the stakeholders are, and how to engage meaningfully with those stakeholders in design. The ultimate goal of VSD is to arrive at salient design collaboratively with stakeholders because, in the end, we are all in this together, so we can’t afford to design things without each other.
In the end, regardless of what approach designers adopt, transformative technologies will continue to become more ubiquitous and, therefore, more pervasive in our everyday lives. We need to begin thinking about cooperative and meaningful ways to support the variety of human values that are important to us. We are all stakeholders in some way in the impacts that these technologies will have. We need to reframe innovating responsibly then as a ‘togetherness’ that emerges from genuine co-design of peoples from all societies and cultures.
