My phone is not a fridge
By: Sebastian Mueller
Tags: Ethics, Design, Responsibility, Technology, Innovation

One of the critical problems in technology today is a lack of empathy. People are stuck in their echo chambers in these hip tech companies staffed with young people of remarkably little cognitive and moral diversity. When their company’s workforce bears no resemblance to most of their customer base, it is no wonder they don’t get the problems. No matter how much user research they do, their customers will always be foreign to them, leaving plenty of room for projection where empathy should reign supreme.

Creator responsibility

Along the lines of a big push for sustainability, topics like extended producer responsibility are hotly discussed and debated. Essentially, the goal is to expand the responsibility a producer of goods has from mere warranty into areas of dealing with disposal and more. This is supposed to ensure that they already care about repairability and recyclability during the design and manufacturing process.

We need a similar concept for creators of software systems and expand their responsibility for their creation. If a product team releases a feature that shows apparent harmful effects, they must be liable to fix it or otherwise face penalties. This is needed to address the diffusion of responsibility that happens in large companies, where in the end no one feels responsible for anything, and ethics is left unconsidered.

That would also mean that there needs to be a monitoring of impact beyond just the company’s bottom-line and business metrics. Social and environmental responsibility means monitoring second-and third-order effects, which might sometimes be fuzzier than conversion numbers, to understand what impact a product has.

Sounds complicated? No one said this would be easy. Or that it should be easy. Creation comes with enormous responsibility and should not be taken lightly. By bringing something into existence, you alter the nature of our reality. This should be complicated and well-considered.

My phone is not a fridge.

Photo by Alexandru Acea on Unsplash

The producer of my fridge has a clear responsibility. Today it is the warranty they serve, tomorrow hopefully, the full recycling and disposal as well. Responsibility evolves as we learn that impact products have. What they are indeed not responsible for is what I put into the fridge — because it neither acts as a gatekeeper (like the AppStore), nor does it make recommendations or provides features for third parties to interact with me on a regular and intrusive basis.

The producer of my smartphone today only takes responsibility for the hardware in terms of the warranty. Tomorrow hopefully also for the repairability of it. Soon the disposal as well. Yet, they also need to take responsibility for what they allow onto my phone because it passes their gates. And for what they enable those third-parties to do because they provide the infrastructure.

We can, and should, hold companies like Facebook and Google accountable for their part in all of this. But that does not mean that someone like Apple should be off the hook. If a mobile app uses provided platform features to make it more addictive, someone like Apple is a part of that — and needs to own up to it. They have, admittedly, made relevant updates and moves in the last year. Quite late, and still too little.

Creation should not be taken lightly. And responsibility does not expire.