Googles new offerings will test whether a lucrative but increasingly distrusted industry can boost its business by offering ethical pointers. If successful, the new initiative could spawn a new buzzword: EaaS, for ethics as a service, modeled after cloud industry coinages such as Saas, for software as a service.
In the same year, Google acknowledged testing a version of its search engine designed to comply with Chinas authoritarian censorship, and said it would not offer facial recognition technology, as rivals Microsoft and Amazon had for years, because of the risks of abuse.
Facial recognition systems, for example, are often less accurate for Black people and text software can reinforce stereotypes.
In response, some companies have invested in research and review processes designed to prevent the technology going off the rails.
Her team is working through how to offer customers ethical advice without dictating or taking on responsibility for their choices.
Theyre legally compelled to make money and while ethics can be compatible with that, it might also cause some decisions not to go in the most ethical direction, he says.
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