CES is ticking along and among the many fantastic exhibits and keynotes, the undercurrent of responsibility is present clearly. Responsibility can mean a lot of things. It can mean shouldering environmental risks and trying to make one’s impact better; it can mean becoming aware of how company culture – or even their service or product – impacts minorities and where diversity efforts of their own need to be made better. And as such, responsibility isn’t a bad thing… but I am noticing, more and more, a different kind of confused responsibility loom large above innovation, especially but not exclusively in tech.
It’s the responsibility of guilt-by-association, it’s a social trend and it’s not likely to go away any time soon.
I recently wrote about this for a private network I am a part of concerning hopes, fears and demons of driverless vehicles. If I sum up shortly, the driverless vehicle in itself is neither good nor bad – not even safe or perilous when we are talking about potential malfunctions, because that is simply down to quality of work and regular servicing (and already happens with vehicles nowadays) -, but while it could convincingly help us reduce some human-caused problems (road rage, bad driving and bad driving choices, assaults on passengers…), it is also likely that the problems would not go away as such… they would merely be adapted to the new circumstances.
As I stated there, I do not doubt that, in that case, the responsibility would yet again fall onto the shoulders of the innovators – not perpetrators. Much like when Big died in the new Sex and the City series and Peloton suddenly became the scapegoat, it is realistic to expect that this blame would be apportioned to the innovators, owners and people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time in cases of tech innovation (but also corporate situations gone wrong) regardless of the actual responsibility of those actors.
Blame game is plentiful throughout the human history, often in irrational forms (eg witchcraft beliefs, superstitions targeting minority groups, superstitious or ideological moral panics targeting an Other); under irrational, I mean any form that has nothing or little to do with what actually came to pass. It’s the globalisation of an event into a truth, bias, general application of logical fallacies, and many other flaws that we humans have all rolled into one. But with social media, and most notably Twitter, this blame game has gained new life altogether. Perhaps because everyone’s life seems more distant and yet more available for perusal, it has become the norm to overthink the lives and actions of strangers; crazy theories have found plenty of ears, eyes and mouths in exclusive groups that serve as echo chambers for conspiracists and the paranoid all over the world; and interfering, meddling and acting out has become a possible, and even fun, pastime for many.
At the same time, the techlash, the anti-capitalism movements and many other viewpoints find easy targets in who is the modern persona non grata. Today, one no longer needs to fear that they will be accused of being a werewolf (at least not in the West – the belief is unfortunately very much alive elsewhere); now, defamation and even threats following that defamation can happen at any point because someone misinterprets an ad, disagrees with a company’s client base or even simply because their work in tech represents the Other for that person. Often, there is no question of actual responsibility (or consideration of consequences for not one but all the people working there) – responsibility is apportioned by the believing crowd, acting as sleuth, judge, jury, and, in a way, executioner.
This not only messes with our social sense of understanding what are real actions and reactions; it also creates dangerous precedent for how poor due process can be. How many judges, but also other human actors in the police procedures researching a supposed infringement, danger or problem could be persuaded or simply pressured to see the matter from a specific perspective? How many would get away with violations of due process because it happens to mimic the wishes and convictions of the crowd? And what happens when tech is used by a third party that the innovator and even seller have no power over?
More and more, we are seeing the responsibility being placed on the innovating party. Perhaps most visible are the social media giants being blamed for all manner of things – including some they have relatively little power over.
While I believe that it is very important to stretch some international agreements – such as those concerning hate speech and incitement to violence – across these platforms in the most serious ways, as well as perhaps reopen what these agreements actually mean in modern context, it is equally important to remember that having a platform, a product, or creating an app that gets abused in some way by clever criminals, isn’t the same as inviting them there and supporting their actions.
Social media platforms, for instance, are huge. Policing them successfully takes time, staff (who may be traumatised by lengthy exposure even if their work conditions were excellent), but also intimate knowledge of how certain topics present themselves. Few people will openly advertise illicit trade, for instance, or terrorist messages, if they are aware that this could get their content taken off and themselves banned. What they will do is find ways to include ever-changing terms into parlance known to themselves and their target audience. That will make detection more difficult to say the least. Similarly, a useful app being abused by a criminal or criminals may not be the responsibility of the creator. They may take all kinds of precautions – and yet, it just takes one person with the necessary skillset to break through the defences for illicit purposes.
This isn’t just true for modern technology. History is full of real and legendary stories about heroes who cannot be harmed, fortresses that cannot be taken, and deeds that cannot be achieved, that take, either in tale or in real life, just one person clever enough to, at some point, figure out how. And the rest, often literally, is history.
What happens if you go on vacation, and someone breaks into your house, gets into an argument with their mate, and murders them there?
Your house becomes a site of a forensic investigation, which should clear you as soon as there is no evidence linking you to the crime or the two criminals.
That’s the theory.
In reality, it takes one person deciding that they still find you suspicious; there are enough cases of wrongfully convicted people to support this claim.
Humans lead investigations – and humans are capable of, and even prone to, bias, prejudice, personal vendettas and logical fallacies that seem like the truth.
When they get the backing of an echo chamber of people joined by the same bias, the same cause or the same interest, however pathological, this is likely to create a strong effect to put it mildly.
So, to paraphrase what I put in that other article – what happens if someone uses an innovation for nefarious purposes? What happens if a driverless car becomes a scene of a crime?
The responsibility is disturbingly likely to fall on the owner (even if they were not involved) and the maker in an act of crowd justice. This could mean all kinds of things, from harassment and acts of violence to damage to their reputation. And this is without adding beliefs and misconceptions regarding technology.
More and more, I am missing the conversation about this problem when we are discussing responsibility, or even just innovation. That’s not just because this touches in a big way on what I do, what I consult on. I am missing this conversation because it reflects, to me, on a wider issue that will, even if all tech were suddenly to disappear tomorrow, linger, and spread further, affecting our human rights, and therefore our safety, dignity and the right to privacy among other things. This conversation, therefore, must become a must for us. In discussions of law. In discussions of innovation. In discussion of medical science, corporate work, diversity, everywhere. We must be aware of the hidden danger of guilt-by-association, and we must learn to understand what we are looking at, and for, to avoid it leading us to the same pitfalls we have historically already climbed from.