Background
As a Symbolic Systems major drawn to the intersection of AI, human behavior, and social science, working at Facebook seems like the perfect fit. After all, Mark Zuckerberg called SymSys majors “among the most talented people in the world,” and Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox even studied SymSys.
Ethical Dilemma
However, reading “Working for Ethically Complicated Organizations” urged me to more critically consider this job prospect. The article’s narrative on The Harvard Psilocybin Project, particularly the question, “Is it immoral to experiment on people,” leading into its point about the “exploitation of consumers,” caused me to reckon with Facebook’s experimentation on people and users without sufficient guardrails.
“The Facebook Papers” similarly state that “the feed decides the content [the users] see” which can have problematic implications, such as echo chambers, as I saw in the Netflix film “The Social Dilemma.”
Conclusion
This dilemma led me to ponder the following two questions from “Working for Ethically Complicated Organizations”:
- What makes a company’s work—or a university’s, or a nonprofit organization’s—unethical?
- I’ve got an attractive job offer from an unethical organization: can I work there anyway?
I think the characterization of companies is not as simple as calling them either ethical or unethical. Tech companies with less ethical backlash like OpenAI still have controversies, such as the teenage suicide following conversations with ChatGPT. And, on the flip side, companies like Facebook have still pioneered category-creating innovation, such as social media. We just need to maximize the ethical aspects, embedding governance and diverse stakeholder participation into tech systems, products, and organizations to align them with human needs and values.
Through this line of thought, I came to the same conclusion as the article: “Yes. The question is how.”
I have always had an obligation to make sure my work is human-centered, whether in research or applied projects, and I agree that “accepting a job at a company can be a route to changing that company’s policy.” I believe the solution lies in going back to Facebook’s roots as a company at the intersection of tech and humans, informed by fields of study like SymSys, as any company involving humans must take a humanistic approach. Our future calls for an approach to tech based on human benefit and alignment—where humans remain in the loop.
