Harvard Business Review

How to Avoid the Ethical Nightmares of Emerging Technology

A framework for navigating the worst of what AI, quantum computing, and other new technologies could create.

Summary: Next-generation technologies are poised to cause society-shaking shifts at unprecedented speed and scale. Generative AI, quantum computing, blockchain, and other technologies present novel ethical problems that ā€œbusiness as usualā€ just canā€™t handle. To meet these challenges, leaders need to do something different: They must talk about ethics in direct, clear terms, and they must not only define their ethical nightmares but also explain how theyā€™re going to prevent them.

To prepare for the ethical challenges ahead, companies need to ensure their senior leaders understand these technologies and are aligned on the ethical risks, perform a gap and feasibility analysis, build a strategy, and implement it. All of this requires an important shift from thinking of our digital ethical nightmares as a technology problem to a leadership problem.

Facebook, which was created in 2004,Ā amassed 100 million usersĀ in justĀ four and a half years. The speed and scale of its growth was unprecedented. Before anyone had a chance to understand the problems the social media network could cause, it had grown into an entrenched behemoth.

In 2015, the platformā€™s role in violating citizensā€™ privacy and its potential for political manipulation was exposed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Around the same time, in Myanmar, the social network amplified disinformation and calls for violence against the Rohingya, an ethnic minority in the country, which culminated in a genocide that began in 2016. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that Instagram, which had been acquired by Facebook in 2012, had conducted research showing that the app was toxic to the mental health of teenage girls.

Defenders of Facebook say that these impacts were unintended and unforeseeable. Critics claim that, instead of moving fast and breaking things, social media companies should have proactively avoided ethical catastrophe. But both sides agree that new technologies can give rise to ethical nightmares, and that should make business leaders ā€” and society ā€” very, very nervous.

We are at the beginning of another technological revolution, this time with generative AI ā€” models that can produce text, images, and more. It tookĀ just two monthsĀ for OpenAIā€™s ChatGPT to pass 100Ā million users. Within six months of its launch, Microsoft released ChatGPT-powered Bing; Google demoed its latest large language model (LLM), Bard; and Meta released LLaMA. ChatGPT-5 will likely be here before we know it. And unlike social media, which remains largely centralized, this technology is already in the hands of thousands of people. Researchers at StanfordĀ recreated ChatGPT for about $600Ā and made their model, called Alpaca, open-source. By early April,Ā more than 2,400 peopleĀ had made their own versions of it.

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