This month, the reckoning of Big Tech’s power simultaneously swept the halls of Congress and the homes of millions. The U.S. House Subcommittee on Antitrust released its scathing report on the monopoly power of Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. Meanwhile, the popular Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” gave a dramatized look at how social media companies use their platforms to manipulate our behavior. The spotlight on Big Tech and its ills shines brightly.
The biggest questions Silicon Valley faces right now are not about technology but rather about policy. Society has not made significant progress in deciding what the responsibility of platforms should be. Our current laissez-faire approach to Big Tech deciding their own role in society has created a massive power imbalance. As Representative Jerry Nadler emphasized in his foreword to the aforementioned congressional report, “companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies that we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” As of now, there is little policy that forces these companies to give up any of their power, and we continue to rely on the ethical good will of the technology creators to respond to problems they have unintentionally created. But these engineers are maybe not the most well equipped to solve such challenges.
Since Hewlett and Packard founded HP in their Palo Alto garage, Stanford University has educated many of the leaders in Silicon Valley. Stanford’s engineering students have played a critical role in developing the technology which got us here. However, until recently, Stanford has done little to train these technologists about the possible negative impact of their work. Even as the university has made efforts to recognize the responsibilities of engineers, the University has still failed to significantly move outside of the engineering sphere and create opportunities for undergraduate students of all academic backgrounds to contribute to the ongoing tech policy debates. While Stanford engineering students have built technologies that have gotten us to this moment, it might very well be Stanford’s policy wonks and humanities students who help shape the future of tech in our lives.
As Stanford grapples with the global impact of its innovations, the School of Engineering is working to increase its ethical education in the computer science major. I recently discussed this with Alex Zaheer, ‘20, a Stanford international policy coterm student with a computer science undergraduate degree. He noted that over the six years he’s spent at Stanford, he witnessed the CS department go from dismissing to acknowledging the engineer’s role in the ethical implications of their creations. In response, the department has included more humanities perspectives in its graduation requirements. They’ve beefed up CS182: Ethics, Public Policy, and Technology and allowed humanities courses to count as electives, all while the university has invested in a new institute on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. There’s even a brand new Ethics and Technology Minor. However, these steps still focus the reckoning of Big Tech companies and society around technology and engineering students. We are at a point where we can’t just solve policy challenges with more technology.
An engineering education may not be enough to navigate the challenges that lie before us. I’ve witnessed an important divide in the education of engineering and policy students on campus. In CS182, which I took last winter, I was pleasantly surprised to see the majority of my peers in the class were engineering students, many of whom had incredible experience in industry. During the mid-quarter evaluation, one criticism became apparent: students were frustrated that there were no solutions to the complex trade-offs we discussed. As an international relations student, this was a reality to which I was much more accustomed. My classes, such as those on foreign policy decision making, often force me and my peers to confront problems that have no clean solutions and prioritize competing values. Yet for many engineering students in CS182, these types of problems were a turn off. While providing creative engineers with more ethical perspectives may inspire some to spend a little extra time considering the impact of the technology they create, an engineering education is no longer what can answer Silicon Valley’s biggest questions.
Instead, this is a moment which calls upon students to be prepared to deal with abstract policy and ethical questions. In international relations classes, students dive into the challenges of arms races and bask in the imperfections of nuclear treaties. In political philosophy classes, students debate the fundamental structure of society and what we should value. In policy classes, students learn how to ask effective questions about economic, political, and social trends, and then use data to develop clearer understandings. These practices apply directly to the difficult questions of tech policy at hand: How can we continue to innovate while still finding the space to question the impact of our innovations? What do we value for individual users in a digital world? How do we continue to use a data-driven understanding of the impact of these technology companies to regulate effectively? And most importantly, how do we reign in the power of Big Tech while not diminishing the positive impact that many of their technologies have on our lives?
Ultimately, Stanford social science and humanities students are in a unique position to answer these questions, and thus lead the future of technology policy. As the premier research institute in Silicon Valley, Stanford’s departments across these disciplines have an up-close perspective on the incentives that drive innovation here. Now, instead of bringing ethicists into classes for CS students, let’s expand the discussion to the classrooms of policy wonks and ethics geeks. As undergraduates, we can create a stronger culture of civic engagement across campus that considers how the government can help steer the direction of technology toward the public interest. To be clear, Stanford engineering students should continue to innovate with the more ethically-grounded mindset that Stanford is now promoting – I am constantly in awe of what my peers create. They should also use their depth of technical background to help lawmakers develop technically-informed technology policy. But it’s time to center new voices and new disciplines in this discussion. Stanford undergraduates can model the necessary inclusion of social science and ethics to meet this moment.