The central challenge ethics owners in tech companies are grappling with is negotiating between external pressures to respond to ethical crises at the same time that they must be responsive to the internal processes of their companies and the industry. On the one hand, external criticisms push them toward challenging core business practices and priorities. On the other hand, there are pressures to establish or restore predictable processes and outcomes that serve the bottom line. This ratchets up the pressure to fit in and ratchets down the capacity to object to ethically questionable products, which makes it all the more difficult to distinguish between success and failure — moral victories can look like punishment while ethically questionable products earn big bonuses. The tensions that arise from this must be worked through, with one eye on process, but also with the other eye squarely focused on outcomes for the broader society.
If it seems like every week there’s a new scandal about ethics and the tech industry, it’s not your imagination. Even as the tech industry is trying to establish concrete practices and institutions around tech ethics, hard lessons are being learned about the wide gap between the practices of “doing ethics” and what people think of as “ethical”. This helps explain, in part, why it raises eyebrows when Google dissolves its short-lived AI ethics advisory board, in the face of public outcry about including a controversial alumnus of the Heritage Foundation on it, or when organized pressure from Google’s engineering staff results in the cancellation of military contracts.
