Can an Online Course Help Big Tech Find Its Soul?
The course, which comes out of beta today, was developed by the Center for Humane Technology. The nonprofit’s purpose has mainly been to give language to the uneasiness around technology’s impact on society, popularizing terms like “time well spent” (a metric to replace engagement on screens) and “human downgrading” (to describe the cumulative negative effect of technology on peoples’ cognition). The organization’s cofounder is Tristan Harris, an ex-Googler who called attention to the search giant’s extractive features in 2013. He has since left the industry and made a career out of rehabilitating it. ...
The new course is meant, in part, to answer that question, speaking directly to rehabilitated techies like Read. It contains eight modules and is intended to take about eight hours total, plus additional time spent on worksheets, reflection exercises, and optional discussion groups over Zoom. Read, who “binged” the course, says he completed it in about two weeks. ...
One module focuses on the psychology of persuasive tech and includes a “humane design guide” for creating more respectful products. Another encourages technologists to identify their highest values and the ways those values interact with their work. At the end of the lesson, a worksheet invites them to imagine sipping tea at age 70, looking back on their life. “What’s the career you look back on? What are the ways you’ve influenced the world?” ...
The Center for Humane Technology is not the first organization to make a tool kit for concerned tech workers. The Tech and Society Solutions Lab has released two, in 2018 and 2020, designed to encourage more ethical conversations within tech companies and startups. But the center’s new course is novel in the way that it tries to create community out of the burgeoning “humane tech” movement. ...
