Our Favorite Stories of 2023
Thank you to everyone who supported the launch and growth of our newsletter in our first year. We appreciate every subscriber and hope you all had a wonderful holiday. We’re kicking off the new year by sharing our top posts and favorite news stories from the past year. Enjoy!
Our Favorite Posts
The Profit in Privacy: How Ethical Tech Wins Consumer Trust and Boosts Your Bottom Line (December 5) - We reject the myth that privacy is bad for business. Here’s the data to prove it.
Is Biden’s Executive Order the Policy We’ve All Been Waiting for? (November 7) - The biggest policy moment of the year happened when President Biden announced his Executive Order on AI. Lots of the details will not be ironed out until 2024, we’ll be eagerly watching to see how they develop.
What Do Americans Think of AI? Data from Our National Survey (October 18) - Christmas came early for the ETP community when we got our national poll results on how American consumers felt about AI.
Data Stewardship Is A Business Imperative (August 22) - We don’t just argue for ethical tech because we think it’s moral. We also think it’s good business, and the companies that respect people’s data will win in the Age of AI.
Consumers Are Calling for Data Freedom - Will AI Companies Listen? (October 31) In our series on how American consumers felt about AI and our core principles based on our national poll, we loved seeing how unanimous people were in wanting to have control over their data. Here’s to greater agency over data in 2024!
Our Favorite News Stories
An Industry In Conflict: It’s Time For Tough Questions And Hard Decisions (Ad Exchanger, September 18) - Arielle Garcia, wrote about her resignation as Chief Privacy & Responsibility Officer at UM Worldwide. This decision was based on a deep sense of conflict between her own technology ethics and the direction of the tech industry. This piece captured the sentiment that many other ethical tech advocates feel in their own roles - if that sounds like you then give it a read!
My bad VR trip (The Verge, April 5) - This offers a first-hand account of a “VR Hangover” experienced by our board member, Sara Watson, after spending time using Meta’s Quest Pro. She brings her background as a social scientist and ethnographer to explore the phenomenon of VR disorientation (which is more common in women based on Meta’s designs not accounting for women’s anatomy) and proposes tactics to minimize the harmful side effects of time spent in VR.
How to fix the internet: If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms (MIT Technology Review, October 17) - The internet is our greatest source of truth and toxicity. Katie Notopoulos lays out how we can structure the web in a way that brings out humanity’s better angels and reminds us that it is possible to make things better.
8 Big Questions About AI (New York Times, June 1) - Not only does this OpEd touch on all the fundamental debates over AI, it also is a creative piece of interactive journalism using videos made with stable diffusion
Data Dignity and the Inversion of AI (Youtube, September 15) Jaron Lanier’s lecture at Berkeley lays out a vision for using AI as a collaboration between creators and users. This radical rethinking of the relationship between the creators of content and users of AI models in a way that could improve AI, provide dignity to creators, and solve critical AI alignment issues.
Reality Check: How to Protect Human Rights in the 3D Immersive Web (NYU Stern, September 1) - While this report focuses on the metaverse, we think the way it applies principles of ethical tech can help inform how we build privacy and data dignity into all emerging platforms.
The People OpenAI Should Consider for Its New Board (The Information, December 14) - Who oversees the development of AI is critical for ensuring it is developed responsibly. In this piece our Board Chair and Founder, Tom Chavez, lays out a vision for OpenAI’s board that demonstrates the critical need for diverse perspectives in AI leadership, not just engineering horsepower.
The Ethical Tech Project In The News
Ethical Tech Project Unveils Strategic, Technical Frameworks for Privacy (Fast Company, July 26) - The announcement of our launch!
How to Design an Ethical Data Ecosystem for the AI Era (The Messenger, September 18) - This oped, written by our board members Maritza Johnson and Sara Watson, lay out how to apply our 5 core principles to build ethical data systems.
Our National Poll on AI - Last but not least, here’s an overview of the results of our national poll on American consumer sentiment on the use of AI.
