“… we just try to move 1-2 clicks faster than other companies and sometimes we go too fast and mess up a bunch of stuff and we have to fix it and that’s cool!” – Mark Zuckerberg (2018) (Constine, 2018)
This quote is evidence of Facebook’s dynamic style of working. While Facebook has certainly done good on a large scale this work ethic has also added its share to the election of the current president of the US and has fostered violent and religiously motivated persecutions and killings in Myanmar (Mozur, 2018). At the same time, technology is rapidly turning many industries into platform driven oligopolies, thereby manifesting the position of our beloved Facebooks and Googles. It is undeniable, that we have and will increasingly become exposed to the handful of companies, which have and will “try to move 1-2 clicks faster than other companies”.
In its quest, Facebook is not alone. Its rival, Google, has recently picked up the construction of a search engine for the Chinese market, a precedence case that should teach us two lessons (Meyer, 2018; Bump, 2018). Firstly, even the biggest and most influential companies can be forced to obey regulatory limits set by our governments. Secondly, the fact that many of the involved developers did for a long time not even know what project they were working on shows how detached many non-C-level employees can become from their projects and how little the general workforce is involved in ethical decision-making. In such cases only higher-level executives, which are oftentimes compensated based on short-term goals rather than ethicality are the ones making the decision for our society.
These cases show that we need to actively confine the limits of the front-running tech-companies. We need to set clear regulatory boundaries for ethics and technology. Especially, in times of rapid AI development, such initiatives are non-negotiable.
Let’s not leave it up to the big players alone to inform our regulatory bodies, drive the change and ultimately shape regulations on technology and the future we are living in.
Sources:
Bump, P. (2018). Five ways the Trump campaign was aided by Facebook. [online] The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/facebook-scandal-latest-donald-trump-campaign-presidential-election-cambridge-analytica-steve-bannon-a8269706.html [Accessed 16 Oct. 2018].
Constine, J. (2018). Facebook and the endless string of worst-case scenarios. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/move-fast-and-fake-things/ [Accessed 16 Oct. 2018].
Meyer, D. (2018). http://fortune.com. [online] Fortune. Available at: http://fortune.com/2018/08/17/google-china-search-employees/ [Accessed 16 Oct. 2018].
Mozur, P. (2018). A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html [Accessed 16 Oct. 2018].
Great post! I could not agree more. Definitely these firms add a lot of value – but we need to implement regulation and not allow them to regulate themselves. Google’s recent closing of Google Plus being shut down after a data breach – which at first they assessed as not critical to share with the world (waiting nearly half a year) – clearly shows that we have to do something.