Chapter 8 Reading Response

Principle 8.5 reminded me a lot of the current moral and ethical dilemmas Silicon Valley has been facing in regards to accountability, responsibility, and power dynamics. I completely agree that “technology cannot be neutral because it is created by humans and is to be used by humans.” I think this philosophy is often lost when analyzing technology companies because people can distance themselves from to technology’s consequences because technologies can be viewed as their “own entity.” Just looking at how Facebook has been in the spotlight for many privacy violations, I don’t think the creators of Facebook really thought through how this type of technology impacts society on a long term scale; however, when approaching the design of a technology, especially one that is going to be globally used, thinking about long term impacts is critical because these are “consequences that shape our lives and our character.”

CS 182 was the first class I took at Stanford that really addressed this problem in Silicon Valley and start-up culture in general. It is not enough to just think about how to make a product work, the design must take into account human error, social rules and constructs, and really involve compassion and empathy. So many students I run into are often focused on optimizing their product to make it the most “efficient,” and lack the human side to their designs. This is one of the reasons start-ups can fail — people can’t just make technologies and assume people will understand how to use it AND use it responsibly. Snapchat is another example of a Stanford company that I think neglected to think about responsible customer usage. It’s honestly a pretty dangerous platform for teenagers to be using, and the danger lies in how Snapchat is constructed — a disappearing photo messaging platform just lends itself to secrecy and harmful distribution.

Prioritizing moral and ethical decision making when designing platforms should really be emphasized more heavily in academic settings in order to try and mitigate the problem of harmful technologies being released with no regulation. There are so many student start-ups that are formed on campus, and I wonder how many of these students took a class like CS 182 that forces people to think about the consequences to their actions (I know, what a crazy thing to ask of people!). If not, then does Stanford hold responsibility for not equipping their students with the skills to design responsibly?