It is easy to be swept away by new and powerful tech tools - like AI - without meaningfully considering their impact on society. And tech innovation impacts society - intentionally and unintentionally - in real ways and at immense speed and scale.
There is something else powerful it does with unmatched efficiency and accuracy: it is a magnifying mirror of who we are, especially the parts we rather not talk about.
Professor Louise Chude-Sokei made that point in a talk I attended at Carnegie Mellon University in 2018. Using sources, he linked in no uncertain terms science fiction stories of robot uprising with fears of slave rebellion. He shared with us this picture from 1931 of “Rastus Robot, the Mechanical Negro”, made in Pittsburgh by Westinghouse.
I was working at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute at that time. It took an English professor from Boston University to introduce me and my colleagues to this piece of local tech history.
To describe the experience of this talk, my friend Michelle King calls to mind what it’s like “when someone puts your head on the ground and kicks it far, far away.” You know the feeling. Sharing links to Chude Sokei’s work after the talk, Michelle started her email with “I’m sorry, and you’re welcome!”
Michelle and I, and our colleagues attending this talk considered ourselves to be working at the forefront of values-based tech practice, and we were. We helped educators and administrators take a pause from the ed-tech arms race. We worked together with them to consider what it is that they were looking to do in the world; what were their - and their students - values, super-powers and needs. We provided space and permission to center all of these before making decisions about what to use in the classroom, and whether technology was the right answer. We designed and led professional development fostering fluency and critical, empowered approaches to AI, big data, robotics and other concepts and tools.
I did similar work with tech startups, helping them to - quoting another friend, Chris Colbert - “insert human” into their day-to-day work on tech innovation.
Coaching business leaders on ethical tech innovation kept bringing me back to the power of tech as a magnifying mirror of who we are.
This, in turn, brought me to zoom out and consider the reality tech magnifies: our ethics source code, our partnerships network architecture, the structural engineering of our business systems and models.
At a conference this fall, I had the opportunity to lead a conversation with a group of tech innovators about the human operating systems at play in tech innovation. I showed them this image of “the mechanical negro”. Ninety years later, it is easy to recognize how this is wrong on so many levels. But back then, Westinghouse took Rastus on the road to feature in trade shows. The newspaper headlines were, in fact, celebrating the cutting-edge progress.
“How can you tell today,” I asked the group, “that you are not that engineer in the picture?“
“We can’t” they answered. And I agree.
What we CAN do is make explicit the realities our tech magnifies. Or, in the words of another friend, and Ethics MVP cofounder, Jessica Pachuta: “Make it normal to talk about ethics at work.” That is what gets me out of bed every morning.
When, in your business, do conversations about ethics take place?
Where else can they happen?What else can we do?Reply with your observations. I read and respond to every email.
Want to dig deeper? Here is the list of resources I shared with participants in my talk this fall.
