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Colleges Must Play a Role in Bridging Ethics and Technology

By  Shobita Parthasarathy and 
David H. Guston
October 13, 2019

There’s a growing sentiment in the country that technology doesn’t always serve the public interest.

Civil-rights proponents are frustrated by the use of facial recognition in policing, and concerned about both algorithmic bias toward and increased surveillance of marginalized communities. Others are worried that not enough deliberation is taking place before controversial experimentation, arguing, for example, that the Chinese scientist who successfully edited the genomes of human twins in utero last year crossed an ethical bright line. And last month, 1,200 college students — including some from Silicon Valley pipeline institutions like Stanford and MIT — pledged not to work for the big-data firm Palantir because of its contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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There’s a growing sentiment in the country that technology doesn’t always serve the public interest.

Civil-rights proponents are frustrated by the use of facial recognition in policing, and concerned about both algorithmic bias toward and increased surveillance of marginalized communities. Others are worried that not enough deliberation is taking place before controversial experimentation, arguing, for example, that the Chinese scientist who successfully edited the genomes of human twins in utero last year crossed an ethical bright line. And last month, 1,200 college students — including some from Silicon Valley pipeline institutions like Stanford and MIT — pledged not to work for the big-data firm Palantir because of its contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

These examples make clear that colleges need to change their approach to technological progress. They can no longer ask themselves simply, How can we innovate? They must also fully prepare themselves to answer the question, How should we innovate? With spending on research and development in the United States exceeding half a trillion dollars annually, and two-thirds of it generated by the private sector, building the capacity to teach and study the ethical and societal dimensions of science and technology is of the utmost importance.

Colleges must train the next generation of scientists, engineers, and policy makers to think more critically about how new science and technology serve the public interest. They need to support faculty research on how to develop and govern science and technology so they respond better to public values and priorities. And colleges need to teach all students about the importance of science, technology, and innovation in their futures and how they can help create better futures for themselves, their communities, and their planet — even if they don’t know how to code.

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The good news is that many colleges already have basic expertise and infrastructure in place. Decades ago, in response to an earlier generation’s catalog of worrisome technologies, from atomic weapons to industrial chemicals to recombinant DNA, interdisciplinary groups of scholars came together with a similar goal: to leverage knowledge and methods from the social sciences and humanities to maximize the public benefits of science and technology and minimize their drawbacks.

Going under the name STS (Science, Technology, and Society, or Science and Technology Studies), this field has taught us that social values are embedded not just in policies for science and technology but also in the processes of inquiry and design themselves. For example, algorithms designed to remove human judgment from decision making about setting bail still reflect centuries of racism embedded in our social structures. Simply tweaking the algorithm or diversifying the engineering work force will not solve the problem; only transformational societal action will.

Today’s technological concerns tend to focus on the digital realm, including algorithms and other applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and the relationship between digital innovation and work. But in order begin to deal with their consequences in a timely fashion, we must develop insights across technologies and from experience.

The point is not to argue over whether digital or biological innovations are going to change the world more profoundly. Rather, it is to recognize that themes about the public interest cut across technologies, including how they distribute risks and benefits, their implications for deeply held but hard to quantify values like human identity, citizenship, and democracy, and the question of who has actually participated in the visions for these technologies in the first place.

Although techniques have been designed to anticipate the ethical and societal implications of technology, more needs to be done. College leaders should expand STS research and programs and expand interdisciplinary educational opportunities that teach students across disciplines about the complex relationships of science, technology, innovation, policy, and society.

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A new program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where one of us teaches, takes this approach. The technology-assessment clinic, housed in the program of science, technology, and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, teaches a multidisciplinary group of students how to identify and evaluate the societal challenges posed by emerging technologies — taking deep dives into particular technologies but, importantly, returning to comparative and unifying perspectives.

At Arizona State University, where the other one of us teaches, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society plans to offer next year a master-of-science program in public-interest technology, which will teach core competencies like how to engage with the public and how to assess the consequences of technology. It will include electives across a set of major global challenges in engineering accessible to students with technical and nontechnical backgrounds.

Another step in the right direction is the creation of the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN), supported by New America, the Ford Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. With 21 inaugural member universities — including our own — PIT-UN aims to build public-interest technology “through curriculum development, faculty research opportunities, and experiential-learning programs, in order to inspire a new generation of civic-minded technologists and policy leaders.”

Last month funders announced the first winners of $3.1 million in grants to start projects at member universities. Examples of funded activities include one at Michigan to track the potentially public-interest, technology-inflected careers of engineers of color, and one at Arizona State to train professionals at science museums to work with local government, community organizations, or colleges on topics in public-interest technology.

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More than 15 years ago, one of us called on colleges to create centers for responsible innovation to balance out the commercial values that they had been developing. The need for such mechanisms to grapple with the values embedded in our science-and-technology enterprise and bend them toward the public good is even stronger today. Colleges can lead the effort to put our technological futures in the hands of people wiser and more far-seeing than they are today.

A version of this article appeared in the October 18, 2019, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
TechnologyInnovation & Transformation
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