Topic: Ethics

How Do I Know If I’m Doing Good? Practicing Ethical Design within Complex Systems

What You’ll Learn

• A systems-oriented understanding of ethical challenges for designers.
• Guiding principles for ethical practice in complex environments.
• Techniques for incorporating ethics into your work—whether by adding new methods, or by deepening the methods you already use.
• Recommendations on how our professional community can move forward with ethics as a core part of our field.

Ethics for the AI Age

Over the next two decades, connected products will demand an unprecedented amount of user trust. Technologists and designers will ask the public for yet more of their attention, more of their data, more of their lives. AIs will know users’ deepest secrets. Co-operating devices will automate security and safety. Autonomous vehicles will even make life-or-death decisions for passengers. But ours is an industry still unwilling to grapple with the ethical, social, and political angles of this future. We mistakenly believe that technology is neutral; that mere objects cannot have moral relevance. And so we make embarrassing blunders—racist chatbots, manipulative research, privacy violations—that undermine trust and harm those we should help. This is a dangerous trajectory. We urgently need a deeper ethical dialogue about emerging technology, and interaction design’s role within it.