Leading Tech Ethicist Helps SMBs Navigate Emerging Tech

Tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar shares a framework for balancing business needs and ethical growth.

Technology is meant to make our lives easier, but assessing, selecting, and implementing new solutions for small to midsize companies is anything but straightforward. In your quest to discover which emerging technologies can drive innovation and enable growth, ethics may not be on your list of considerations—but it should be.

Tech ethicist and founder of the non-profit All Tech Is Human, David Ryan Polgar, has spent his career grappling with the thorny questions of how technology impacts us as individuals and as a society. We recently spoke with him to understand the need for ethics in tech, the consequences of ignoring them, and how they impact small business leaders today.

“I saw how social media was affecting us on a deeper, more emotional level. It really was something that was intertwined and intersecting with our social systems.”

David Ryan Polgar

Leading tech ethicist

For over a decade, Polgar has put his legal training to work exploring the ethical implications of new technologies. This relatively new field rapidly developed after social media gained popularity and Polgar explains the newfound needs for ethics in tech.

The need for tech ethics today 

How could ethics be impacting your business?  Polgar explains that ethics serve as a bellwether for where the law is headed. By including ethical considerations, you can avoid future legal jeopardy and ensure long-term success.

To frame his approach to change, Polgar reflects on the not so distant past when now ubiquitous  technologies had fewer restrictions that we couldn’t fathom today. 

“Seatbelts weren't always in cars, right? That wasn't always mandated,” Polgar told us. 

Later, when social media was first emerging, founders were focused on the technology itself, scalability, and the possibilities of sharing of information and connecting one another. There weren’t, however, enough people thinking about bad actors and negative consequences. It is now understood that the far reaching results of that lack of oversight could continue to shape society for generations to come.

According to Polgar, there is a real need for a broader conversation about the social impacts of technology that includes many more perspectives. And AI affords a new opportunity to have conversations about outcomes—both good and bad—that we didn’t have in social media’s infancy. Companies are investing heavily, and the race for market dominance is on, but the potential for harm should give us pause.

“What I would always recommend is recognizing that there are potential drawbacks with these emerging technologies like generative AI,” says Polgar. “It really is essential that all of these smaller businesses do adequate homework, but I'll also say that you never want to scare away innovation.”

Companies shouldn’t wait to take advantage of the benefits that comes with new AI breakthroughs, but they do need to make sure they have an ethical framework to prevent consequences such as:

• Consumer rejection of the business

• Legal action and/or changes to the legal landscape that impact businesses

• Push back from governments in the form of new legislation

What can be done differently today

According to Polgar, every major tech shift also coincides with a tech panic. And each time a balance of a business’ responsibility to customers, the users’ personal responsibility, and government’s responsibility to enforce reasonable limits on both parties must be struck. 

Polgar reflects that if he could do his career over again, he would be more assertive in advising businesses on the need to consider tech ethics.

What would he advise SMBs do differently today? Choose to have the hard discussions about what you can do versus what you should do. Like the tortoise, you can “grow smart” and win the race by:

“I think another misconception is that tech ethics is more academic in nature when, in fact, it's constantly thinking about the impact or ramifications of innovation,” says Polgar. “You'll always find with tech ethics that it's going to intersect with a lot of areas that we think about with democracy. And that could also coincide with the fact that as Americans, that tends to be the lens we're viewing it through."

What questions should SMBs be asking about new technology to anticipate legal and ethical implications?

• How are different users going to use it? 

• How could it be exploited? 

• How could it be misused and abused?

• What are the data privacy problems that could occur?

• Are there likely to be regulations from countries outside the U.S.?

Embracing new tech, ethically 

As AI becomes an increasingly large part of our business and personal lives, we need to make decisions about data privacy, ownership of ideas and content, and accessibility. The impact of this technology on individuals and society requires us to discuss these issues and scaffold innovation with rules that protect us from harm. 

But that doesn’t mean starting from scratch every time a new technology comes on the scene. Polgar says that although AI may be new, there are existing frameworks that can guide its development.

“Technology may change,” Polgar said, “but human behavior doesn’t.”