Overview

Technology impacts our lives in countless ways—facilitating public services, supporting access to education and jobs, and enabling commerce and communication. We encounter it in almost everything we do. But there isn’t a unified or comprehensive global approach for responsible development and use of digital solutions that intentionally incorporates inclusivity and ethical innovation considerations. This critical gap is complicated by the crowded and fractured landscape of existing codes of ethics and conduct and the need to establish standards and norms that affect all professions working in the technology space.

In 2022, New America launched an open inquiry exploring the merits of overarching guiding principles for technologists created through cross-sector collaboration and designed alongside a framework for implementation. Through a series of consultations and roundtables held over the course of a year, we found strong support for effective, inclusive, and consistent guiding principles among a broad range of stakeholders.

The consensus recommendation resulting from this collaborative effort is challenging yet clear: Empower the creation of a framework broad enough to be practical and accessible for general use and understanding, specific enough for applicability and accountability, and flexible enough to respond to ongoing processes and refinement.

This brief is not a set of guiding principles; it is a collective summary of findings that highlight areas of additional inquiry and research. It also suggests next steps to move this effort forward globally, while building off of existing work and resources in the field. Digital platforms, models, standards, and systems will continue to reflect the values and norms of technologists and the organizations they work for. Democracies should seize this opportunity to better define consistent principles that apply to all technologists, explore new structures or incentives for implementation, and build capacity for public interest tech.

New America’s Digital Impact and Governance Initiative (DIGI) hypothesized that a technologist code of ethics could provide an ethical framework for technologists to help ensure better people-centered outcomes when developing and harnessing digital tools. This concept of applying ethics to a practice or institution isn’t novel. Such a code, commonplace in professional fields like social work, law, and medicine, could define “values, ethical principles, and ethical standards to which professionals aspire and by which their actions can be judged.”¹

New America recognized that a public interest technology (PIT) lens,² focusing on issues of justice and equity at the intersection of technology and policy, could provide a useful framework for testing the effectiveness of a technologist code of ethics with democratic values and respect for human rights central to the profession. This orientation could allow technologists to rethink the transformative and diverse ways in which technology impacts every community and encourage a more global dialogue on the tradeoffs and opportunities at the intersection of innovation, modernization, and fundamental rights.

At RightsCon 2022, New America committed to exploring a foundational process around creating a technologist code of ethics. In concert with this announcement, a panel discussion, A Technologist Code of Ethics: Building a Rights-Respecting Digital Future, featuring technologists and global civil society leaders, delved into the potential for a code and the role of norms, standards, and culture in building a rights-respecting digital future.

The first phase of this work required conducting landscape research on existing science- and technology-related codes of ethics, as well as facilitating roundtable conversations with technology, civil society, social science, business, government, and academic experts around the world to determine the validity of the goal.

DIGI partnered with New America's Public Interest Technology and released a request for proposals (RFP) for Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) member universities to host cross-sector roundtables. PIT-UN is a consortium of 65 universities and colleges working to build public interest technology as a discipline within academia and develop the skills of the next generation of technologists to better assess the ethical, social, political, and economic dimensions of innovation.

Four proposals were selected. Over the course of the roundtables, over 170 academic instructors, students, industry professionals, public servants, civil society members, activists, and innovators discussed the value and potential of a technologist code of ethics.

New America provided framing and prompts to help launch the discussions. The following provocation served as the problem statement for the roundtables:

There have been multiple efforts to develop versions of a technologist code of ethics. However, because of many challenges—including lack of enforcement mechanisms, limited buy-in, and an imprecise or overly specific criteria for who is considered a technologist—prior efforts have not gained widespread traction. By centering a cross-sector collaboration to inform a new technologist code of ethics, this effort has the potential to generate a new standard for technologists. Together, perspectives from academia, the private sector, civil society and governments, accreditation agencies, and professional societies can provide input into content, implementation, and enforcement of a new code. A code of ethics, if drafted with care through an inclusive and multi-stakeholder process, and paired with enforcement structures, could help transform the underlying values of global technical innovation and shift the norms towards people-centric development and design.

For details on the responses to the problem statement and specific prompts, please see the Additional Resources section.

It became clear from the outset of the convenings that lexicon poses one of the first hurdles—with common terms being interpreted differently or used interchangeably.

For example, the terms “technologist” and “technology” are often ambiguous and evolving, given the immense scope of the field and the variety of skills, roles, and expertise of the practitioners involved. In the interest of clarity, New America offers these foundational definitions.

• “Technologist” is a person who uses designed artifacts for the purpose of solving problems or making products. This broad conceptualization of technologists includes portions of communities that currently have codes of ethics— computing professionals, data scientists, intelligent systems designers, software engineers, and others—and communities or practitioners without formal codes, such as some civil society technologists and hobbyists. Some communities that lack formal codes may already abide by codes, or at least should have the same standards apply as others doing similar technologist work.
• “Technology” includes computer software and hardware, information systems, electronic devices, mobile phones, robotics, biotechnology and genetic engineering, artificial intelligence (AI), data mining and other analytic technologies. Of paramount concern is the impact (both intended and unintended) that technology can have on the community.³

Further, in the foundational convenings and consultations, participants often used the terms “code,” “guidelines,” “principles,” and “frameworks” interchangeably. It became apparent that the application of frameworks, codes, and standards will be complicated by the fact that these terms aren’t easy to understand or agreed upon in theory or in practice.

In contemplating a “code of ethics,” this exploration was guided by Merriam-Webster’s definition of the term: “a set of rules about good and bad behavior.” However, in practice: What is good and bad behavior in the development and use of technology? While seemingly simple, this has clearly been a challenge for some of the largest tech companies—given the magnitude of unintended, or even intentional, consequences—or for regulatory bodies empowered to protect the public interest. Further, many participants from various roundtables flagged that there isn’t a single approach to ethics, and the overall effort could benefit by better defining collective approaches to related areas like virtues, values, and rights.

Participants concluded that the application of lexicon matters. It is a challenge that needs to be addressed—especially in the early stages of thinking through an effective approach to guiding principles for technology practitioners.