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Technology is often designed and deployed without critical reflection of the values that it embodies. Value trade-offs—between security and privacy, free speech and dignity, autonomy and human agency, and different conceptions of fairness—abound in many technologies that are now achieving great scale in commonly used tech platforms. The decisions made by the people inside the companies deploying those technologies impose their value choices upon millions of users, often with negative externalities that are now on full display.
In our new book, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot, we provide a multidisciplinary view—the perspectives of a philosopher, a political scientist, and a computer scientist, respectively—to disentangle the systematic drivers that we believe have led to the ethical reckoning that Big Tech is now facing.
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