Recent controversies related to topics such as fake news, privacy, and algorithmic bias have prompted increased public scrutiny of digital technologies and soul-searching among many of the people associated with their development. In response, the tech industry, academia, civil society, and governments have rapidly increased their attention to "ethics" in the design and use of digital technologies ("tech ethics"). Yet almost as quickly as ethics discourse has proliferated across the world of digital technologies, the limitations of these approaches have also become apparent: tech ethics is vague and toothless, is subsumed into corporate logics and incentives, and has a myopic focus on individual engineers and technology design rather than on the structures and cultures of technology production. As a result of these limitations, many have grown skeptical of tech ethics and its proponents, charging them with "ethics-washing": promoting ethics research and discourse to defuse criticism and government regulation without committing to ethical behavior. By looking at how ethics has been taken up in both science and business in superficial and depoliticizing ways, I recast tech ethics as a terrain of contestation where the central fault line is not whether it is desirable to be ethical, but what "ethics" entails and who gets to define it. This framing highlights the significant limits of current approaches to tech ethics and the importance of studying the formulation and real-world effects of tech ethics. In order to identify and develop more rigorous strategies for reforming digital technologies and the social relations that they mediate, I describe a sociotechnical approach to tech ethics, one that reflexively applies many of tech ethics' own lessons regarding digital technologies to tech ethics itself.
翻译:最近与假新闻、隐私和算法偏向等主题有关的争议在近期引发了公众对于数字技术以及与其发展有关的许多人的思索的日益深入审查。 作为回应,技术产业、学术界、民间社会和政府迅速提高了对数字技术(“技术伦理 ” ) 设计和使用中“道德”的注意力。 道德论的论调在数字技术世界中蔓延,这些方法的局限性也变得十分明显:技术伦理模糊不清,没有牙,被纳入公司逻辑和激励机制,并且对数字技术的设计和技术设计过于偏重于个人工程师和技术设计,而不是技术生产的结构和文化。由于这些限制,许多技术产业、学术界、学术界、民间社会和政府迅速增加了对数字技术设计和使用“道德”的注意力。尽管道德论调在数字技术世界中几乎与伦理学的论述一样迅速。 通过研究科学和商业界如何以肤浅和非政治化的方式提升道德观,我重新将技术伦理学作为竞争的地貌,而核心的伦理学线则不适宜于技术伦理学和伦理学本身,而使技术的伦理学本身具有重要的伦理学意义。