Move Slow & Think Things Through: Why Technology Could Use Some (Ethical) Philosophy

A piece from the freelancing Dead Letter Office

The Social Network (Columbia Pictures/Sony)

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.” Whenever a new form of technology has a profound and irreversible effect on society, cultural commentators are quick to use that idiom. Whether it’s the effects of streaming on how we consume music, Uber’s disruption of the taxi industry, or the commodification of our personal data, the saying holds true. Time’s arrow isn’t going to fly back into its quiver; for better or worse, technology pushes ever onward and we’re faced with chasing after it or risk getting left behind.

Looking over some of the issues that Silicon Valley has been facing over the last three years, it’s hard not to view the public backlash over Cambridge Analytica, the unreliability of risk assessment algorithms, or the anxiety over self-driving cars as a kind of Monkey’s Paw curse at work. We asked the genie to give us a more connected, convenient world, and it did — with a bitterly ironic twist. Because that’s what genies do: they give you what you want and make you regret it…. unless you know the exact right way to ask for it.