In January, Rice University professor and former CACM editor-in-chief Moshe Y. Vardi wrote about the unintended consequences of social media and laptops in “Computing, You Have Blood on Your Hands!"
To close the year, Vardi referred to the role played by workers in her field technology, enabling dubious Big business models Solution – including and of the new model powered-by-AI Big Tech Surveillance Capitalism – in an opinion piece titled “I Was Wrong about the Ethics Crisis".
Vardi states:
"Belief in the magical power of freedom market which always serves the public good has no theory base. In fact, the current climate crisis is a proven market failure. To take an extreme example, Big Tobacco certainly does not support the public good, and most of us would agree that it is unethical to work for Big Tobacco."
"The question, then, is whether Big Tech supports the public good, and if not, what should be done?"
Of course, there is no simple answer to such a question, and the only logical answer to the question of whether it is ethical to work for Big Tech is:
"It depends". [...] It's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it, author and political activist Upton said Sinclair. By and large, Big Tech workers don't seem to have such stark dilemmas, I believe, hence my conclusion that we are indeed suffering from a moral crisis."
