Conclusion

Coming from a background of working with binary logic, the lack of clear answers in ethics can be frustrating at first. Yet, the implications of how our work impacts the world, including unintended consequences and the work becoming weaponized by bad actors, are some of the most important questions we can (and should!) consider. Even though there aren’t any easy answers, there are definite pitfalls to avoid and practices to follow to move toward more ethical behavior.

Many people (including us!) are looking for more satisfying, solid answers about how to address harmful impacts of technology. However, given the complex, far-reaching, and interdisciplinary nature of the problems we are facing, there are no simple solutions. Julia Angwin, former senior reporter at ProPublica who focuses on issues of algorithmic bias and surveillance (and one of the 2016 investigators of the COMPAS recidivism algorithm that helped spark the field of FAccT) said in a 2019 interview:

: I strongly believe that in order to solve a problem, you have to diagnose it, and that we’re still in the diagnosis phase of this. If you think about the turn of the century and industrialization, we had, I don’t know, 30 years of child labor, unlimited work hours, terrible working conditions, and it took a lot of journalist muckraking and advocacy to diagnose the problem and have some understanding of what it was, and then the activism to get laws changed. I feel like we’re in a second industrialization of data information… I see my role as trying to make as clear as possible what the downsides are, and diagnosing them really accurately so that they can be solvable. That’s hard work, and lots more people need to be doing it.

It’s reassuring that Angwin thinks we are largely still in the diagnosis phase: if your understanding of these problems feels incomplete, that is normal and natural. Nobody has a “cure” yet, although it is vital that we continue working to better understand and address the problems we are facing.

One of our reviewers for this book, Fred Monroe, used to work in hedge fund trading. He told us, after reading this chapter, that many of the issues discussed here (distribution of data being dramatically different than what a model was trained on, the impact feedback loops on a model once deployed and at scale, and so forth) were also key issues for building profitable trading models. The kinds of things you need to do to consider societal consequences are going to have a lot of overlap with things you need to do to consider organizational, market, and customer consequences—so thinking carefully about ethics can also help you think carefully about how to make your data product successful more generally!