INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Epstein is the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT, and the author of the New York Times bestselling book Good Without God
More posts by this contributorIn June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M
Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review
it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy.Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series
of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees.Below he speaks to two key
organizers: Gideon Lichfield, the editor in chief of the MIT Technology Review, and Karen Hao, its artificial intelligence reporter
Lichfield led the creative process of choosing speakers and framing panels and discussions at the EmTech Next conference, and both Lichfield
and Hao spoke and moderated key discussions.Gideon Lichfield is the editor in chief at MIT Technology Review
have?Gideon Lichfield: I frame this as an aspiration
Most of the tech journalism, most of the tech media industry that exists, is born in some way of the era just before the dot-com boom
When there was a lot of optimism about technology
And so I saw its role as being to talk about everything that technology makes possible
Sometimes in a very negative sense
More often in a positive sense
You know, all the wonderful ways in which tech will change our lives
So there was a lot of cheerleading in those days.In more recent years, there has been a lot of backlash, a lot of fear, a lot of dystopia, a
lot of all of the ways in which tech is threatening us
use it, and regulate it to make well informed decisions about it, and for them to understand each other better
And I said the role of a tech publication like Tech Review, one that is under a university like MIT, probably uniquely among tech
To try to influence those people by informing them better and instigating conversations among them
So that ultimately better decisions get taken and technology has more beneficial effects
and your staff have a lot of sort of editorial meetings where you set, you know, what are the key themes that we really need to explore
What do we need to inform people about, right?Yes.What do you want people to take away from this conference then?A lot of the people in the
audience work at medium and large companies
culture? How should it affect their high end decisions? How should it affect their technology investments? And I think the goal for me is,
or for us is, that they come away from this conference with a rounded picture of the different factors that can play a role.There are no
But they ought to be able to think in an informed and in a nuanced way
All of the different implications that that has, and all the decisions you can take around that, we want them to think about that in a
are here getting themselves more educated and therefore more likely to just continue to win
that it has been taking place, up till now, mainly among the people who understand the technology and its consequences
Which with was the people building it and then a small group of scholars studying it
Initially it really was only the tech people and the business people who were there
From labor, from community organizations, from minority groups
cause and say, yeah, this is something we have to care about.In some ways this is a tech ethics conference
If you labeled it as such, would that dramatically affect the attendance? Would you get fewer of the actual business people to come to a
things I need to think about to stay ahead of the game? The case we can make is [about the] ethical considerations are part of that calculus
You have to think about what are the risks going to be to you of, you know, getting rid of all your workforce and relying on contract
others here with serious ethical messages.What about the idea of giving back versus taking less? There was an L.A
It talked about how 20% of Harvard Law grads go into public service after their graduation but if you look at engineering graduates, the
percentage is smaller than that
But even going beyond that perspective, Anand Giridharadas, popular author and critic of contemporary capitalism, might say that while we
In other words: pay more taxes
To maybe pay taxes on robots, that sort of thing
Not in the philosophy sense your background is from
those questions.A bunch of the technologies that have emerged in the last couple of decades were thought of as being good, as being
Mainly because they were thought of as being democratizing
wise and good things with it
And that will benefit everybody.And these technologies, including the web, social media, smart phones, you could include digital cameras,
you could include consumer genetic testing, all things that put a lot more power in the hands of the people, have turned out to be capable
of having toxic effects as well.That took everybody by surprise
And the reason that has raised a conversation around tech ethics is that it also happens that a lot of those technologies are ones in which
the nature of the technology favors the emergence of a dominant player
Because of network effects or because they require lots of data
And so the conversation has been, what is the responsibility of that dominant player to design the technology in such a way that it has
fewer of these harmful effects? And that again is partly because the forces that in the past might have constrained those effects, or
imposed rules, are not moving fast enough
Policy makers, and civil society have been slower to catch up to what the effects are
about the use of technology and about breaking up big tech
That would have been unthinkable a year or two ago.So the discussion about tech ethics is essentially saying these companies grew too fast,
What is their responsibility to slow themselves down before everybody else catches up?Another piece that interests me is how sometimes the
A way to ultimately persuade people not to regulate
Not to take their own power back as a people
Is there a level of tech generosity that is actually harmful in that sense?I suppose
It depends on the context
I can certainly see the United States being particularly susceptible to this dynamic, where government sheds responsibility
