Employees rising

Activism in Silicon Valley could change the world

Last month, Microsoft (MS) CEO Satya Nadella was forced to address an unusual set of concerns raised by employees. More than 300 employees (a vast majority of whom are also shareholders) had signed an open letter, demanding that MS cease to work with the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement Agency (or ICE) owing to its “inhumane” practice of separating children from their parents. The letter went further, demanding that MS take an ethical stand to place children above profits and terminate its relations with ICE and any entity that directly enabled ICE. MS provides cloud-based services to ICE and was also helping the agency develop a better face-recognition technology. In response, Mr Nadella released an internal memo, describing ICE’s policy as “cruel and abusive” and clarified that while MS would not work with ICE on any project that enabled the separation of families, it would not go so far as to publicly cut all ties with ICE.

This is the third recent instance when a Silicon Valley institution has been forced to reconsider taking on cutting-edge projects for the US government agencies. In each of these instances, key personnel working on those projects have protested strongly about the implications. In June, Google decided to withdraw from an image recognition research project it was conducting at the behest of the US Department of Defense to improve drone identification of images. More than 4,000 Google employees signed an open letter, asking their company to pull out of the project because of the fear that the project could lead to the development of drones that could autonomously assault targets. Google went further than MS in that it laid down an ethical code for AI research wherein it said that it would not help develop AI either for enabling weapons or for violating internationally accepted standards of human rights. Amazon, too, is facing similar pressure from shareholders to stop providing facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies. The apprehension is that these tools could be used in racial profiling, leading to discrimination, and they might enable repressing human rights if deployed by authoritarian regimes.

Corporates have often faced ethical dilemmas in the past. They have sometimes responded ethically — for example, Eastman Kodak pulled out of South Africa in 1986 when it was asked to enable the apartheid system by deploying its polaroid instant photo technology in generating ID cards. However, corporates have usually placed profits ahead of ethics, in most situations. For example, Siemens used slave labour to run its factories during World War II.

Employee activism of this nature is a new phenomenon. There are several unusual underpinnings. For one, the tech industry is a global melting pot — both the Google and MS CEOs are immigrants and so are thousands of their employees. Secondly, the sweat equity culture makes valued employees into shareholders, giving them more clout than in the more conventional corporate structures. A loss of image that affects shareholder value directly affects their net worth so they have more incentive to try and avoid negative publicity. A third factor is the cutting-edge nature of this work — there are relatively few people possessing the expertise to do these projects. As such, they are a powerful pressure group. That may explain why such acts of employee activism may not be so easily replicable in other sectors.

However, it is an interesting phenomenon and could lead to unusual outcomes. Technology has always been seen as morally neutral. It can be a powerful force for good but it is often used for evil purposes. A great example would be the Haber Process, which is key to producing both fertilisers and poison gas. This is the first time that key producers of technology have collectively demanded ethical standards from corporates and government institutions. If the movement spreads, it could change the world.