Why Ethics Can't Save Tech
Summary
As fake news floods our feeds and small businesses suffer due to disruption from startups, many tech designers are hearing exhortations to focus on ethics. There are tool kits, checklists and even a sort of hippocratic oath for designers to take. These efforts are laudable and understandable, and they can help in some ways -- notably, in reducing harms of bias. But ethics also have limits because private sector capitalism is a force that is much bigger than anything that any one person can do. Instead, a countervailing force, such as the public sector, is needed to shape our technology. How might designers better understand, and even seek to work with and strengthen the public sector -- whose role it is to shape society? Alexandra is the author of the new Rosenfeld Media title, Deliberate Intervention: Using Policy and Design to Blunt the Harms of New Technology
Key Insights
-
•
Ethical design can address some tech pain points but often fails to prevent systemic harms that occur beyond individual user experiences.
-
•
Systemic harms often emerge after technology deployment and are difficult to detect through standard UX research focused on pain points.
-
•
Many harms in technology contradict core business models, making them controversial and hard to fix through design alone.
-
•
Policy, driven by collective values, complements UX design’s focus on profit and user delight and is essential to mitigate societal harms.
-
•
Designers who understand both user problems and policy landscapes can more effectively advocate for harm reduction through legislation and regulation.
-
•
Cross-sector collaboration between design and policy is still nascent but shows promising examples like regulatory sandboxes in fintech.
-
•
User-centered design methods can and should be incorporated into various stages of the policy cycle to improve policymaking.
-
•
International contexts reveal different relationships between UX, capitalism, and public sector involvement, highlighting the uniqueness of the US tech ecosystem.
-
•
Civil society and consumer voices play a critical role in influencing design and technology policy, often pushing for accessibility and ethical considerations.
-
•
Designers should abandon the savior complex and recognize their influence has limits, encouraging collaborative systemic approaches.
Notable Quotes
"Design ethics can impact some harms of new technology but not all."
"Standard design research looks for pain points, not harms, and harms often cannot be identified in typical user research."
"Many tech harms run counter to business goals and can be controversial to address."
"Policy is ideally driven by values, while UX in the private sector is driven by delight and profit."
"How do we as designers connect more deeply with the policy world? That’s still a developing thing."
"Technology moves faster than policymaking — that’s the pacing problem we need to address."
"User-centered design methods can be used at every stage of policy making, from intention setting to evaluation."
"We should reconsider the savior complex designers sometimes have — we’re not all powerful."
"The future of our technology cannot and should not rest solely on the ethics of individual designers."
"I’m totally freaked out by facial recognition and wonder why we don’t get together as consumers to push back on bad designs."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"You need both a bottom-up and a top-down approach to achieve organizational alignment for information architecture."
Bram WesselEnterprise Information Architecture
January 10, 2020
"Design systems help address integration challenges and differing cadences between design and development."
John DevanneyThe Design Management Office
November 6, 2017
"Product managers learn to attach at the end of every sentence something about money — no money, no attention."
Rich MironovHow Can Product Managers and UXers Help Each Other (and Why are Product Folks so Annoying Sometimes)?
December 6, 2022
"Designing for change means focusing on learnability and product consumability, not just ease of use."
Malini RaoLessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey
June 9, 2021
"Having a subject matter expert act as a dot connector across research studies greatly improves insight reuse."
Iulia CornigeanuQuantQual Book Club: Small Data
March 8, 2024
"If someone only reads the first few paragraphs or attends the first 10 minutes, they should still get the key takeaways."
Bruce GillespieLearning from journalism: Balancing impactful communication with compassionate storytelling
March 13, 2025
"AI makes data more accessible to everyone but won’t replace the need for validated, empathetic UX research."
Rima Campbell Amrit S BhachuIncrease Productivity and Drive Business Impact
September 24, 2024
"Evals are everywhere, right? Everybody's talking about evals. It is like one of the key things in developing useful AI products."
Peter Van DijckHands-on AI #2: Understanding evals: LLM as a Judge
October 15, 2025
"Storytelling has the power to disrupt hegemonic narratives and open space for people to be authors of their own stories."
Bilan HashiThe Tension Between Story Collecting and Story Telling in Research
March 10, 2021
