Introducing TechnoEthos

How this (and all) my articles work: Have 5 to 10 minutes? You can read everything written below. Have less than 5 minutes and/or only want to read paragraphs that dive into ideas that interest you? Read the “In Summary” sections after each paragraph to capture my main ideas and decide if you want to read in more detail.

To Summarize What You Will Read Below (The TL;DR): I have decided to take a private market approach to addressing negative socio-economic outcomes made (without malice) by digital technology advancements. I am introducing how I got here, my idea, and planned development process below.

Why am I building TechnoEthos?

In 2022, two months before embarking on an Erasmus Mundus International Master’s Program, GLOCAL (Global Markets, Local Creativities), I read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. This book, along with my GLOCAL coursework once I started the program, made clear to me how advancements in digital technologies hold both the ability to deepen the economic, social, and political stratification of society and create a better, almost utopian, world for humanity. Today, many of the conversations on the power of digital technology development center around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and (potential) Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, all digital technologies have far-reaching scopes and thus risk implications; whether that be social media websites, cryptocurrencies, “smart” devices, or voice recognition assistants.

In Summary: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshanna Zuboff and my coursework at GLOCAL highlighted to me that digital technologies can both do great good and significant harm in society. Digital technologies encompass not only AI and (potential) AGI but also social media, ‘smart’ devices, voice recognition assistants, and more.

The far-reaching impact of digital technologies creates opportunities for profound negative consequences. Ideally, those who develop and iterate on digital technologies to create products should do so with this in mind. However, up until now, mottos such as “build fast, break things” have driven Silicon Valley’s growth and culture. For all the promise that digital technology innovation has behind it, its biggest promise for those who invest in its development is the profits that it can bring. For now, profits from digital technologies are easiest to achieve through a customer base’s frequency of use, dependence, and the collecting and selling of data. The idea is that digital technology products provide a win-win scenario, companies make a lot of money while people get access to tools that make their lives easier. No need to send a letter in the mail, no need to fly out to see your grandchild, no need to go from office to office handing out your resume, no need to pick up the phone and talk to a taxi company, no need to go into a restaurant to collect your to-go order…everything is at your fingertips and/or can be outsourced. In reality, digital technology advancements do not only provide win-win outcomes. Entire industries and work types are being wiped out (with no plans on how to upskill or reskill those who lost their jobs), an increasing share of workers are freelance, live paycheck to paycheck, and have no retirement plan or health insurance, political stratification and extremism is normalizing and spreading at a brisk pace and so on. The natural answer thus far to these issues and more is that governments and international bodies can provide regulations and recommendations in response to these harms. This answer is not enough.

In Summary: Digital technology products today are often invested in due to their potential for profit. Profits are easiest achieved by those who develop these products by making users dependent on their tools. Consequently, development and design align with this motive, which sometimes leads to negative consequences on individual, societal, and humanitarian levels. Governments and international bodies are often looked at as the responsible parties for keeping these adverse outcomes in check. It is not enough.

The Problem in Today’s Eco-System

The governmental bodies, both national and international, tasked with regulating companies or providing policy recommendations, move very slowly. Legislation’s reactive nature can often mean that it comes in too late. Another issue with legislation can be that it can either be ill-informed or politically motivated. This is not to say that all the efforts that governmental bodies have made are insufficient. Legislation such as the GDPR and DSA is critical for keeping companies in check and providing ethical frameworks. However, even when laws and recommendations do what they are supposed to do, they require interpretation and operationalization, easier said than done.

There are many policy and research centers, advocacy groups, and non-profits that focus on the many ethical dilemmas that come from digital technologies today, and provide a rich amount of information for developers to implement as they make their decisions. However, the role of development teams is to release and maintain a product that provides a service to its customers and provides returns on investments. They do not have time or incentive to find all of these centers and sort through 50+ page reports, white papers, attend conferences and webinars, and pay for team onboarding, training, or require them to spend hours of their workdays doing online certifications.

With these realities, companies end up doing whatever the bare minimum is needed to comply with existing frameworks and do whatever is relevant to avoid PR crises. It is seemingly cheaper to spend millions of dollars every year towards lobbying to keep the status quo that works for the products, pay for fines as they come up, or pay PR firms to help control their image if things go wrong than the re-education of a large work force and reconstruction of product development approach to have more ethical, human centered outcomes.

In Summary: Currently, the responsibility of addressing harmful effects of digital technologies largely falls on regulators and research groups. While both provide helpful guidelines and critical legal frameworks and penalties, both are imperfect for providing information that is operationalizable for product managers and development teams whose main focus is developing a product which makes money.

About the TechnoEthos Ethics Dashboard (TEED)

This is why I am launching TechnoEthos. The intention of TechnoEthos is to provide a streamlined technical tool that those developing digital technologies can use to ensure that their products create more ethical outcomes while keeping up with the pace of their development process.

TechnoEthos’ first and primary product will be the TechnoEthos Ethics Dashboard, which will bridge the gap between policy, theory, and action. It will consolidate existing ethical guidelines, legal regulations, and best practices into a single platform where product managers, developers, and decision-makers can see and engage with ethical risk assessments as they build. Users will be able to input the scope of their products; what it does, how it interacts with users, which markets it will serve, and how it will be released to the public. Based on the input, the dashboard will automatically flag ethical risks across multiple dimensions, like security, privacy, labor rights, urban impact, and more.

Each flagged area will include concrete suggestions for improvement. For example, if a product is flagged for privacy risks, the dashboard may recommend implementing AES-256 encryption and ensuring clearer user consent protocols. Or, suppose a founder indicates they plan to drop 20,000 scooters in a major city, the dashboard may flag risks related to urban congestion and safety standards, and suggest coordination with city planners and speed limitations for public safety. It may also provide contact points for relevant stakeholders. By addressing flags, users will receive an Ethics Score for their product. The Ethics Score will be a key feature of the TechnoEthos Ethics Dashboard. The goal is for the Ethics Score and issues addressed and not addressed to exist publicly. This will help provide consumers with more information on the products that they are using, and can be a useful signaling tool for companies.

For now, the TechnoEthos Ethics Dashboard is an idea, and its core dimensions, sources, and constructions are under development. I have decided to publicly document my journey of building this company and its product.

In Summary: I am launching TechnoEthos, a company focused on creating a streamlined technical tool that will help digital technology product developers integrate more ethical approaches into their building process. It will consolidate legal frameworks, ethical guidelines, and best practices into a dashboard that will provide live feedback and suggestions.

My Next Steps & Needs (Get Involved!)

Here on TechnoEthos.Blog, Substack, YouTube, and any other platforms I may find along the way, I will document my development process. For now, I am solo, and I look forward to and hope for the day when I will have co-founders. I will expect them to also build in public with me as well. This first post is simply the “announcement,” which frames how I got here and what I hope to do. If you’ve gotten this far down the post, you may be interested in getting involved (or might have questions, concerns, and thoughts). I am looking for:

1. Funders (to support me and my co-founders as we build)
2. Co-Founders, I am looking for two co-founders
   1. Founding Engineer and Scoring Systems Architect: You will build the technical backbone. Working closely with the Founding Ethicist, you will translate distilled ethical principles and regulations into system logic that can be applied consistently across products. You will design and implement the systems that connect this backend logic to the frontend dashboard. You will also architect the scoring system, ensuring it is transparent, resistant to manipulation, and capable of producing detailed breakdowns by key areas (such as data privacy, labor rights, or accessibility) so that product teams can understand changes to be made and trace them back to their sources.
   2. Founding Ethicist and Legal Architect: You will design the ethical and governance architecture. This means distilling regulations and frameworks into their core principles and ethical grounding and expressing them in simple, testable logic. You will also ensure that the logic can be communicated with the Founding Engineer and Scoring Systems Architect in a format that is operationalizable for the backend and well reflected in the frontend dashboard. Finally, your role is to ensure that the system is both rigorous and transparent so that it can be defended to technical builders, product teams, and the public.
3. People to provide feedback/perspective on the TechnoEthos Ethics Dashboard (TEED) (Specifically: suggestions for what guidelines should be integrated, ideas for how the weighting system should work, and potential weak points/oversights that can be used to inflate Ethics Scores)

To Summarize: I am building this company and tool publicly, and will post about the process wherever you are reading this as well as on other platforms. I am looking for co-founders, people who can provide their perspectives on this idea to help make it stronger, and funders. Please reach out to me via LinkedIn if you are interested in providing any of these!