Owning Ethics: Organizational Responsibility and Ethics in Silicon Valley

Emanuel Moss and Jacob Metcalf join Stanford HAI for a weekly seminar on May 1, 2020, to discuss their research on Silicon Valley ethics. Over the past few years, a series of crises and scandals have resulted in pushback against some of the biggest tech companies from employees within their ranks and from a broader public. This pushback has highlighted a deep concern with the ethical implications of data-driven technologies that have been implicated in anti-democratic practices, automated warfare, the spread of mis- and disinformation, and the perpetuation of racial and gender disparities. In the wake of this pushback, Silicon Valley tech companies have recently begun to invest resources in hiring personnel to design, develop, and manage a portfolio of practices that can adequately address these areas of ethical concern. Moss and Metcalf discuss their recent research, in which they interviewed dozens of these "ethics owners" to understand how they understand their emerging job roles, the conceptual and organizational challenges that stand in their way, and the tensions that emerge from developing ethics practices inside and across their companies.