Technology products shape the world we live in. They define actions we can make and influence how we interpret the world. Even the most seemingly innocuous product — say Instagram, or Pinterest — affects our behaviour in ethically relevant ways.

Nevertheless, few product teams include ethics explicitly in their decision-making, nor are there shared frameworks for doing so. What’s missing is a conceptual bridge between product strategy and ethics. I’ll try to bridge that gap in this article.

Getting ethics on the agenda of product teams

With increasing societal scrutiny upon them, technology companies are becoming more alert to ethics. …

With great power comes great responsibility, right? I want to help technologists have more informed and fruitful discussions about that responsibility; namely, through getting more involved in technology ethics.

I used a recent vacation to do a deep-dive into the freshest literature on technology ethics. I’ll share my reading list with you in this post, along with an introduction to each book and some food for thought on the shared themes to finish off.

Here’s the reading list:

1. Future Ethics, Cennyd Bowels
2. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, Adam Greenfield
3. Technology and the Virtues, Shannon Valor
4. The Ethics of…

‘Human-centered’ has reached peak buzzword. In design and innovation world, the term is now unavoidable — found liberally splashed over agency websites. Yet it is dangerously loaded.

Human-centred describes an approach employed in design and innovation, made up of the following ideas:

• First, that a human-centred approach would prioritise the needs of human beings, perhaps over the development of technology or business concerns.
• Then, it is used to describe an approach which avoids reducing people down to their function as users, consumers or customers, and instead of seeing them in a complete way.
• Finally, the term is used to describe using humanistic methods, that is, typically qualitative and explorative, for research — a shift away from analytical, quantitative techniques.

These are well-meaning and often fruitful ways of…

At Unreal Co. we believe that it is the quality of our thinking which ensures our competitive edge.

As we rapidly grow as an organisation, we have created the role of Chief Philosophy Officer to ensure our growth aligns with our purpose and values, and our decisions are taken consciously and deliberately.

About the Job

The CPO will be our in-house devil’s advocate, tasked with asking uncomfortable questions which ensure our business success.

We are seeking a practical, business-minded philosopher, with an advanced humanistic education and on-the-ground company experience.

You will work in a consultative role, networking across our organisation, with key stakeholders…

Group brainstorms are inefficient and produce low-value ideas.

You may think this heretical, but in this article I hope to convince you on why I think a “two-storm” approach is more efficient, sustainable, and produces better ideas.

I’ll also give you some tips for how to do a two-storm, including an agenda you can lift.

Brainstorms don’t work

First off, a few words on why group brainstorms are not fit for purpose — at least, when the purpose is idea generation.

• Three is a crowd. Put more than two people in a room and a pack mentality forms. …

Tech discourse is using the term “humanise” to describe everything from designing more personable chatbots, through to ensuring an AI overlord doesn’t enslave the human race.

I find this use of the term confused. We need a more sharply defined understanding of what it means to humanise for the term to be useful.

For example, at a Google For Startups event in Berlin this week, billed “Humanising AI,” the discussion was absent of any critical conversation around what it means to humanise AI. …

How long did I sleep? How many steps did I take? How many calories did I eat? These questions were the mainstay of the Quantified Self movement. While getting the data on your life was alluring — even addictive — it rarely revealed fresh insights. A new category, Qualified Self, built upon on AI which can analyse qualitative information, may take its place.

The demise of Quantified Self

The Quantified Self movement aimed to provide “self-knowledge through self-tracking with technology.” It boiled life down into questions of quantity. Mostly, the data would confirm to us what we already knew — I slept badly, I ate…

I’ve started learning German. Right now, I have just about enough German to say that ich spreche kein Deutsch. That is, I’m a total beginner. But I’m already gathering a list of poems in the language, poems which I plan to understand and even memorise.

With this secret geeky weekend ritual, through Spanish, Portuguese, Danish and now German, I’ve found that poetry is my most useful tool in learning a language. So, fellow language learners, allow me to make a case for poetry.

Apps and textbooks are mind-numbing

Apps like DuoLingo and Memrise are great for cramming vocabulary. But damn, they butcher the language. I’ve…