At Tesla and Other Big Tech Firms, It’s Not the Machines But the Assumptions Behind Them Causing Problems

New technologies always bring out nervous nellies. In 370 BCE, Plato mused in his book Phaedrus that the increased “trend” towards writing would cause men to lose all their retained wisdom. In the 1880s, electric buttons, of all things were feared to cause us all to lose our creativity by letting a button do a task for us. In our generation, there has been deep fear that any exposure to video games will rot kids’ brains. Such theories often ultimately prove themselves wrong. But sometimes, what we might have hoped would remain in the realm of science fiction becomes reality.

We’ve had two very strong reminders about the dangers of unbridled technology adoption in the last few months. Our worst nightmares came true, and lives were irreparably harmed:

• Within hours of Tesla leader Elon Musk touting their self-driving cars on Twitter, a Tesla in self-drive mode decided to pull over on the side of the Bay Bridge, a 4-lane, fast-moving thoroughfare and caused an 8-car accident injuring 9 people including a 2-year-old. This is one of hundreds of accidents that have been caused by Tesla’s self-driving systems, leading to 19 deaths since 2016.
• Randall Reid was on his way to a belated Thanksgiving dinner with his mom when police stopped him and put him in jail for a week after face-matching software had flagged him as a suspect in a Louisiana luxury purse theft case. The only problem? He’d never stepped foot in the state. But, the 28-year-old Georgia resident is African-American–and face recognition software has been widely critiqued for its inability to accurately distinguish between Black faces.

“They told me I had a warrant out of Jefferson Parish. I said, ‘What is Jefferson Parish?’” Reid noted to the AP. “I have never been to Louisiana a day in my life. Then they told me it was for theft. So not only have I not been to Louisiana, I also don’t steal.”

Perhaps not in defense of Elon Musk, but by way of explanation, he has often noted that his altruistic goal is to ultimately reduce the number of traffic accidents and deaths by making cars smarter than humans. And that in order to make those cars smarter, they may need to move fast (literally) and break some things (also, literally) on real roads.

This is where one might align with his goals–safer roads–but dispute his methods–human experimentation. We went from testing medicine on humans–without their consent, in the case of Nazi Germany and the Tuskegee “studies” — to rats, who can’t consent — to industries like cosmetics learning how to test products without the cost of lives, human, animal or otherwise. Can technology be tested without harming people along the way? This is where we — and government regulatory bodies — get to make choices about what sorts of experiments we’re willing to subject our citizens to.

And then in the case of artificial intelligence, there has been reasonable concern expressed that in the context of tech teams that generally lack the diversity of our global world where over 85% of people live in Asia, Africa and Latin America, there is the possibility of significant harm that can be done if technologies fail to incorporate diversity into their designs. People like Timnit Gebru with Black in AI are doing the hard work of trying to keep the people behind the machines accountable but have faced plenty of headwinds given the economic forces that control much of this research.

We don’t have to go back to horses and buggies if we reject self-driving cars. What we CAN do is an advocate for a new tech motto for the next decade: “move slow and break less.”

Similarly, Hermant Tenaja wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “Minimum viable products” must be replaced by “minimum virtuous products”— new offerings that test for the effect on stakeholders and build in guards against potential harms.” He offers eight questions that tech entrepreneurs of today must ask, including:

• What systemic, societal change do you aspire to create with your product?
• How will you sustain the virtue of your product?
• What’s your framework for leveraging data and AI responsibly?
• How do you define and promote diversity in the context of your business?

Entrepreneurs can reflect on these questions for their products. And then for consumers, before turning your face over to the latest, greatest, avatar-generating service, it may be wise to think twice about how that could come back to bite you. We don’t need to ignore technology — but perhaps we can learn to be much more conscious consumers of technology.