I think ultimately, I would work at Meta.
It’s very important to acknowledge that the company has had many ethical failings – gentrification of the greater East Palo Alto has caused displacement of many families and general vitriol toward the company in the surrounding areas. Furthermore, Instagram as a social media platform has been subject to criticism, especially with regard to potential harm for children.
The text however, also asks us to consider “How close is my work to these actions I believe wrong?” I think what’s also worth acknowledging is that there are many separate divisions with Meta. Some divisions, like Llama development and FAIR could be argued to yield a net good with their pioneering of open source AI in an era where concerns about the closed-source nature of leading AI models has been loud.
One of the key takeaways I got from the reading was the idea of ethics not only being an obligation to others, but ethics also being an obligation to oneself. I found this idea to be really interesting – I’d never really considered being ethical as also fulfilling the duties meant for you. I think it’s also somewhat applicable here, especially when the text mentions that the job you take could better equip you for future roles down the line – I think it may be worth considering the credibility that Meta could lend, and how that may lead to you have a bigger impact in roles that you would take down the line. If you’re unable to reconcile the ethical failings of Meta as a company with your own values, you can always just leave after a brief period of time, and leverage what you learned to applications elsewhere. Just because you work at Meta now, doesn’t mean that you have to work there later.
