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The increasing role of technology in business and in American society over the past 50 years has expanded our expectations of “responsible” corporate behavior. The terms computer ethics, engineering ethics, internet ethics, cyberethics, technoethics, biotech ethics, nanotech ethics, and most recently artificial intelligence ethics are all a part of that history. Business’s active management of technology can be dated from Thomas Edison’s lab in the late 1800s in Menlo Park, N.J., and to Henry Ford’s adoption of multiple technologies to create the first assembly line in 1913. From that point forward, corporate industrial laboratories were more important to technological progress than the individual inventor. With this growing business’ role came responsibilities to develop and deploy new technologies to maximize the social good technology could do and to minimize the harm it might also do. In the decades immediately after World War II, rapid technological progress in the use chemicals and in the civilian application of nuclear power, raised the greatest technological concerns. Some of the concerns over chemical safety resulted from the use of harmful chemicals before their full effect was examined or known. In the 1940s and 1950s, widespread use of DDT as a pesticide in fields was credited with increasing yields worldwide, but was effectively halted in the U.S. in 1972 when it was proven that DDT caused both serious environmental and human health damage. The application of nuclear technology to power generation through the building of U.S. nuclear power plants between 1967 and 1990, called for a careful balance between the benefits of “clean” power and the threat of catastrophic meltdowns from runaway nuclear reactions. Companies implemented federally mandated technological standards in building plants in the U.S. and many more abroad. Benefits were considered greater than risks, at least until uncontrolled meltdowns at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, and in Russia at Chernobyl in 1986. Blame fell on both the companies that built the plans and the governments that regulated them. Little new construction has occurred in recent years in the U.S., though 20% of U.S. power is currently generated by 93 reactors at 54 nuclear facilities. New nuclear power plants have been constructed continuously elsewhere in the world, including 60 currently under construction. In the 1960s and 1970s, corporations’ premature and occasionally negligent rollout of technology produced a movement for “technology assessment.” The U.S. Congress established an Office of Technological Assessment in 1972 to advise it on questions of technology. Many companies, who had appointed laboratory directors, technical directors, or occasionally a vice president of technology in the post-war period assigned technology assessment duties to that official. Unsatisfied by the behavior of companies that produced and employed chemicals, a U.S. law, the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976, required reporting, record keeping, and testing of chemicals used in industry. Successive waves of concern for chemical safety focusing on pesticides, dioxins, mercury, lead poisoning, asbestos, and since 2000 on electronic waste, have resulted in tightened regulations and liability. In many industries, companies also developed voluntary organizations to establish principles and practices, and to report on their own behavior. Much of the concern for the negative impact of technology centered on the environmental impacts—from those due to DDT to thousands of other substances companies released into the environment. That subject will be dealt with in a forthcoming newsletter focused specifically on corporate responsibility to the environment and to sustainable management. The dilemma for modern society is whether and how to use each technology or technological advance, and to what extent businesses must be regulated or can be expected to make their own decisions on behalf of society. Such decisions, whether made by a company or by a regulator, require a balance between a technological advance that has the potential to improved life, and that the risk or reality than it will also do harm. Scrutiny of corporate technological responsibility, both from a regulatory and liability perspective, moved from subject to subject, usually following a major disaster or scandal associated with a technology. Attempts to get companies to pay more attention to the negative effects of technology were also aided by civil liability law in the U.S. Egregious impacts of corporate technology were regularly followed by lawsuits seeking damages, aided by the ability to bring class action suits on behalf of all victims. A major split developed between the expectations in Europe and in the U.S. over corporate response (and regulatory policy) toward technological innovation. In Europe, a stricter standard of what became called “the precautionary principle” underlay regulatory policy and expectations of companies. The principle emerged in the 1980s held that a technology ought not to be released if there were any serious concerns about its safety. The concept was featured at UN gatherings and championed by religious leaders. David Brower, a former head of the U.S.-based Sierra Club, left to found a more activist organization called The Friends of the Earth, was quoted as saying “all technology should be considered guilty until proven innocent.” Biotech: Dramatic advances in biotechnology led to scrutiny of how medical technologies were created and then deployed. At times, the effectiveness and negative side effects of the new medical technologies were contested. At other times after the development of a truly life-saving device or therapy, companies were expected to determine how initial supplies should be allocated to the most needy, or to subsidize manufacture and distribution to those who could not afford them. Computer Tech: The coming of computers, particularly the personal computer, led to an ever expanding set of concerns regarding the impact of computer technologies on daily life. First concerns were the employment impact—would computers (and later artificial intelligence) replace all workers? Secondly, concerns focused on the data being collected, or accessible, once the internet was created and broadly available from 1990 on. Companies providing databases or ways of communicating were urged to establish standards for consumer privacy. The U.S. Federal government passed the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and the 1999 Consumer Privacy Act. U.S. states and countries elsewhere in the world followed suit, occasionally imposing tighter standards than the U.S. Federal rules. In response, most large American companies appointed corporate directors or officers with responsibility for complying with the proliferating laws and standards. The first “privacy officers” were appointed in the early 1990s. By 2002 the appointment of such an officer became an expectation of most large American and international firms, whatever the industry. These individuals were charged with the ethical and responsible management of technology affecting the privacy of its customers, users and staff. Internet and Social Media: From 2000 on, the rapid spread of the internet and social media such as Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp, and messaging platforms such as Twitter (X), Tiktok and WeChat gave rise to a new set of technological impacts and expectations of the companies deploying such technologies. Companies were urged to limit use of the platforms by young children, or to ban certain types of content. Debates continue to rage in the mid 2020s over these policies, both the standards (if any) they would establish and who should establish them—regulatory authorities or the companies themselves. By the 2020s, the impact of social media most debated was the mental health impact on users, particularly the youngest users. There were reports of isolated suicides by young users of social media—due to bullying or depression over how their lives fell short of those portrayed by influencers posting online. Artificial Intelligence: With the release of OpenAI’s product ChatGPT in late 2022, the simmering concern over the impact of a new technology called “artificial intelligence” (AI) became a primary focus of the debate over corporate technological responsibility. AI was still little understood; its potential capacities and effects were even less understood. The technological community split between those who favored rapid development of AI and those who opposed it. Early developers of AI lined up on both sides of this question. The U.S. federal government largely kept hands off this new technology while a few U.S.states attempted to regulate it. Only the EU, through its Artificial Intelligence Act, has staked out a regulatory framework to guide the technological development of AI. The EU law takes effect in 2026. In each of the above areas of technological impact, the focus of immediate concern and the regulations adopted have changed repeatedly. This led to new laws, new regulations, and new expectations of corporate responsibility for technology. The responsibility for managing the development and use of technology has created the demand for larger and larger staffs dedicated to that purpose. With the acceleration of technological change, these trends can only continue.
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