Responsible Technology: An Accelerating Movement

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The growth of the field of Responsible Tech is inspiring the emergence of a handful of multidisciplinary degree programs explicitly perched at the intersection of tech and society.

At the same time, Responsible Tech is already a viable career path for those from many different educational backgrounds: those with traditional tech degrees like computer science, data science, information science, engineering, but also those with academic backgrounds from social sciences like sociology, anthropology, psychology, and from disciplines like UX design, human computer interaction, law, policy, and the arts and humanities.

Regardless of educational background and professional experience, there are relevant skills that pop up across the field of Responsible Tech, and having a non-linear career path doesn't appear to be the exception in Responsible Tech, but the norm.

A common skill among our interviewees is being able to bridge the gap between technical understanding and an appreciation of societal impacts. Some key themes that rose to the surface include active listening, making sense of chaos/connecting dots, empathy, curiosity/asking questions to lead to discovering, relationship-building, and strong analytical skills.

To illustrate, here are the skills desire for being a data ethicist:

  • communication skills

  • applied knowledge of social sciences

  • stakeholder relationship management

  • analysis and synthesis

  • bridging the gap between the technical and non-technical

  • product development

  • empathy and inclusivity

  • problem-solving

  • facilitating decisions and risks

Transforming the Responsible Technology talent pipeline to make it more diverse, multidisciplinary, and aligned with the public interest is a crucial component of co-creating a better tech future.

“Transforming the Responsible Technology talent pipeline to make it more diverse, multidisciplinary, and aligned with the public interest is a crucial component of co-creating a better tech future.”

The homogenous sliver of society currently in the position to design, develop, and deploy the technologies that we use every day is failing to effectively and comprehensively navigate the complexities of these emerging technologies, leaving communities vulnerable to negative and unintended impacts.

Our theory of change involves increasing the discoverability of the growing number and types of available opportunities and facilitating participation from talent with a significantly wider variety of backgrounds, disciplines, and lived experiences.

As the meta-connector for the people, organizations, and ideas of the Responsible Tech movement, All Tech Is Human is concerned with multi-stakeholder cooperation, bringing together talented job seekers alongside leading responsible technologists, practitioners, and hiring managers into one collaborative community.

We feature roles that are focused on reducing the harms of technology, diversifying the tech pipeline, and ensuring that tech is aligned with the public interest. We curate a list, updated daily, of hundreds of jobs, internships, and fellowships in fields like:

  • Responsible or Ethical AI

  • Public Interest Technology

  • Online Trust & Safety

  • Tech Policy

  • Data Privacy

  • Accessible & Human-Centered Design

  • Digital Governance

  • Youth, Tech, and Wellbeing

  • Tech & Democracy

There is a vibrant Responsible Tech community filled with hundreds of organizations and thousands of passionate people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Responsible Tech as an ecosystem is a melting pot of disciplines.

The purpose of the Responsible Tech Guide is to both expand the ecosystem and make it more cohesive, creating a culture of knowledge-sharing and collaboration as we co-create a better tech future.

 

An excerpt from All Tech Is Human’s Responsible Tech Guide.  All Tech is Human is led by founder and responsible tech advocate David Ryan Polgar; the international organization was launched in Hartford in 2018 and is now based in New York City. The guide serves as an all-encompassing resource for technologists, practitioners, policymakers, and emerging leaders committed to aligning the future of technology with the public interest.  Their updated Responsible Tech Guide is “designed for people interested in tackling thorny tech & society issues.”  A copy of the Responsible Tech Guide can be seen here.  The All Tech is Human website is alltechishuman.org