Tim Berners-Lee on the Huge Sociotechnical Design Challenge

In a speech discussing ethics and the Internet, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has tasked the technology industry and its coder army with paying continuous attention to the world their software is consuming as they go about connecting humanity through technology. From a report: Coding must mean consciously grappling with ethical choices in addition to architecting systems that respect core human rights like privacy, he suggested. 'Ethics, like technology, is design,' he told delegates at the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (ICDPPC) which is taking place in Brussels this week. 'As we're designing the system, we're designing society. Ethical rules that we choose to put in that design [impact the society]... Nothing is self evident. Everything has to be put out there as something that we think we will be a good idea as a component of our society.' If your tech philosophy is the equivalent of 'move fast and break things' it's a failure of both imagination and innovation to not also keep rethinking policies and terms of service -- 'to a certain extent from scratch' -- to account for fresh social impacts, he argued in the speech. He pointed to how Wikipedia had to rapidly adapt its policies after putting online the power for anyone to edit its encyclopedia, noting: 'They introduced a whole lot of bureaucracy around it but that actually makes it work, and it ended up be coming very functional.' He described today's digital platforms as 'sociotechnical systems' -- meaning 'it's not just about the technology when you click on the link it is about the motivation someone has to make such a great thing because then they are read and the excitement they get just knowing that other people are reading the things that they have written.'

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