The 5 Freshest Books on Ethics that Technologists Must Read 📚

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 Invention, Sheila Jasanoff
5. Moralizing Technology, Peter-Paul Verbeek

If you read this list, you should come away with solid foundation in the current thinking in technology ethics, as well as some concepts and methods which you can put to work in day jobs as designers and makers of tech products and services.

The books are complementary, yet offering wide-ranging perspectives. They are also technology-orientated and contemporary rather than moral philosophy classics or generalist introductions to ethics.

Here we go, an introduction to each of the books.