Ethics is a tricky word. As soon as we mention it, the conversation suddenly becomes awkward. Probably because nowadays, ethics amounts to reading incomprehensible texts on moral and political philosophy which the majority of us simply can't be bothered to read. Who needs ethics anyway? Every time I say that we should be careful with disruptive technologies like autonomous transportation, people look at me as if I’ve told them we should consider massive sterilisation. Ethics is a controversial topic because we seem to attribute to it qualities it traditionally does not possess (I’ll expand on this later). It’s always frustrating to hear people say that X is the future, as if the future is some fixed, predetermined state. If it was, we all might as well just give up living today as there's no way to change the course of the future.

In the late 1960s, Victor Papanek wrote a book about the importance of the design profession, where he identified the enormous social responsibility designers bear. Papanek was a designer. His famous quote from Design for the Real World:

“There are professions more harmful than (industrial) design but only a few of them”,

seems all the more relevant in today’s technology-dominated societies. Many designers talk about ethics these days and a lot of business leaders talk about doing the right thing but the public discrouse on the topic stays predominantly on the surface and design ethics has grown to be a mere trend. We frivolously toss around terms like design ethics, climate change, equality, and what not, however, what we ultimately seem to be doing, is just using these phenomena as greenwashing strategies or image-boosting instruments. Designers have been good at pointing out symptoms, but the root causes seem to get sidelined for one reason or another. 

Technology almost naturally gets blamed about controversies in our contemporary business and social landscape but as the American linguist and social critic Noam Chomski argues, "technology is like a hammer; the hammer doesn’t care whether you use it to build a house or whether a torturer uses it to crash somebody’s skull, the hammer can do either; the same with modern technology". It is we who (should) determine what technology will be used, why and how. 

Who are those “we” that I am referring to? If you consider yourself a designer by either profession or vocation, you have probably heard that one way of looking at design is believing that everything is design and everybody is a designer in a way. Before you get overwhelmed with rage that I am downgrading the design profession by saying that everybody is a designer, let me explain. Design (when thought of as a verb) and create are synonyms. If somebody creates something, from a physical object to a process to an entire organisation, we can say that they design it. Civil engineers design cities, teachers design school curriculums, hotels design experiences. Undoubtedly, the design process of a designer is very different from the design process of an engineer. Designers bring artistic perspectives to the table and are much more skilful at bridging the divide between functionality and aesthetics, but ultimately, both designers and engineers create artefacts that are going to be used by people. This is one of the reasons why human-centered design has recently become so essential to the work of, not only design agencies but also technological companies, and even public sector institutions. Or has it really?

The fallout of human-centred design

Human-centered design, as Donald Norman defined it in the late 1980s, is based on the notion that design should not be disconnected from human cognition. It should be easy to understand, function in a predictive way and cater to the needs of those for whom it is intended. Sounds logical, doesn’t it?

Human-centered design or user-centered design as it’s also known, are great concepts indeed. Designing with the user/human in mind is an amazing, necessary and self-evident approach to how designers (and all other professionals for that matter), should work. Unfortunately, we have overused, overstated and misrepresented human-centered design to the point that it has almost entirely lost its meaning. Individuals and corporations feel compelled to define human-centered design as part of their work style, regardless of whether they actually apply it. Also, we all seem to be very empathetic. I personally cannot say anymore when a company or a designer genuinely works in a human-centered fashion, just because everybody says they do. It is even more difficult to believe that humans are the central reference point for designers and technologists when the social space is constantly getting flooded with addictive devices and dodgy software, which undermine the core elements of what it means to be mortal. Where did the humans go?

As Douglas Rushkoff maintains in his book Team Human, people have become the ground and technology has become the figure. Technology is at the center while humans are in the background, backing it up. We are so focused on developing technology that we have, as Rushkoff eloquently puts it, become “oblivious to major changes in the background”. He makes a great analogy with how education works these days. Whereas before, competitive advantage was the benefit of education, now it is its primary purpose. Before, industry was adjusting itself to education, now it is the opposite — companies dictate what skills are valued and what qualities people must possess if they want to have lucrative careers. Sadly, this is not an honest mistake. In Team Human, Rushkoff talks about something called behavioural design theory. Essentially, this is a design philosophy taught at some universities, whose focus is persuasive manipulation. Today we (are taught to) design so that people change their attitude to match their behaviour, not the other way around. And instead of challenging this nonsensical way of treating people, we obediently follow, reaffirm and applaud. Unsurprisingly, we are on a fast track to designing our own obsolescence.

Contrary to the general perception, economic growth is not going to save us from global poverty and injustice. It is going to intensify them.

Rushkoff holds that corporations and capital growth can scale infinitely, while human capacity has limits. For better or worse, rather the latter, biotechnology and AI can overcome those limits. Being human has become shameful to an extent. Our imperfect human nature is tirelessly trying to mimic and catch up with the perfect nature of machines. We have to be constantly faster, stronger, more productive. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that being efficient is a liability, quite the opposite. I just think we are using the wrong criteria to measure productivity. In the end, being imperfect is what makes us human. This can hardly be classified as a liability, no matter how advanced a technology companies will create, in order to satisfy their proclivities for dominance and financial growth. 

How can we unentangle the technological mess we've designed?

A good start would be to make sure that everybody — from designers, to subject matter experts to leaders, realise that there is a HUGE difference between what we can design and what we should design. The technological capacity to create something does not automatically make it morally permissible. Let’s take a step back and think about whether we should, how this new thing is going to impact people, what the consequences would be, how can we regulate it? Moral behaviour is not something that concerns only a part of the population. Ethics is not exclusive to the philosophy departments in academia and should also be taught to engineers, designers, economists — practically everyone. Instead of institutionalising the numeric superiority of machines over humans, we should remember the primary reason for advancing technology — to serve us humans and make us better, not urge us to desperately compete with it. Very few things in life should be done at any cost.

How does ethics fit in the context of technology?

Doing the right thing is not easy. Is it about weighing preferences and consequences (utilitarianism), giving each what they rightfully deserve (libertarianism), or falling back on our duties and obligations (deontology)? The complexity of this question is the sole reason why philosophers still haven’t found the ultimate answer to it. However, it is a collective concern, nobody gets to opt out of the conversation because someone decided that business and ethics are two conflicting camps. There’s more to our existence than making a transaction out of our humanity and handing over our cognitive abilities and privacy to machines which are, by definition, unable to differentiate between nefarious and virtuous intent.

The Ethics Centre, a non-profit organisation in Australia, argue in their paper Ethical by Design: Principles for Good Technology that ethicists alone cannot resolve the dilemma between humanity and technology. Shared responsibility and collaboration is needed across industries and domains, both academic and entrepreneurial. For one reason or another, we mistakenly take as a given what The Ethics Centre identify as four techno-logical myths*:

1. Technology is value-neutral
2. We should blame the artefacts if things go wrong
3. We can’t halt the tide of technology
4. We can hold off on the ethical questions

*Techno-logic — the logic of control: a way of thinking about technology as something that we can control, measure, store and use (Ethical by Design: Principles of Good Technology, The Ethics Centre).

Sounds great! But ethics is an expensive endeavour

Working at Google, Amazon, Uber, etc. is prestigious