A petition that started with seven Microsoft employees has gained 457 signers asking the company to drop its contract with ICE: “We are part of a growing movement, comprised of many across the industry who recognize the grave responsibility that those creating powerful technology have to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm,” the petition says. This shows that people care about using powerful tech for good and do indeed hold companies responsible for the use of their products.
In terms of who decides what’s right and wrong for a company, we see today that many new roles surface on determining what a company ethically is to do, from consumers to the tech workers inside a company. After reading a Wired article, I learned that the internet has revolutionized communication around the globe in such a way that the decisions of corporations are no longer invisible to the public eye. This gives any person the ability to contribute in the discussion of right and wrong based on their position in society and their ability to bring others to the table. Tech workers at these companies are proving that they have a unique role to play. They are not only privileged with a first hand view of any new ventures within the company, but they have the power to refuse to develop projects they believe to be wrong, bringing the whole process to a halt. Governmental regulation can certainly play a part, but a government can only be as moral and ethical as its citizens. As we move further into an unknown future of expanding centralized power, if we hope to have any chance of holding corporations and governments accountable for their actions, transparency is key. When there is more general visibility into the decision making process of corporations, their users/customers will be better able to judge their morality and decide for themselves if they want to support them.
On corporate person-hood, “Corporations,” as a CRS report explains, “cannot be incarcerated. Nor can they be put to death,” although “government action, public scorn, or the two in concert may wipe them out of existence.” I think this article from the Consumerist does a good job explaining the ways in which a corporation is and isn’t exactly like a ‘person’ under the current legal system. If you look at the two court cases they reference from this decade, they show that corporations are gaining more and more of the same rights humans have, so why shouldn’t they be held to the same moral and ethical standards? I think that the ‘Public’ has the ability to destroy corporations with its scorn/judgement, so in a way all members of the public have a collective moral burden to be informed and hold corporations accountable.
Furthermore, from the same Consumerist article, “a corporation has no need not to incriminate itself because it has no body and cannot be executed or go to jail,” shows that the old view of a corporation was simple and not human-like. But, the latter part of the article explains the complications that came from applying an amendment to corporations: “In a pair of now-infamous cases from 2010 and 2014, the Supreme Court expanded the legal view of corporate person-hood to include some rights under the first amendment that had previously been reserved for the sort of actual humans who do have bodies and can act with intent: enter free speech and religious expression.” This all ties in with Elon Musk’s statements on how corporations are a “cybernetic collective” of humans and machines. The bigger and more technically advanced they become, the less human they are overall. The percentage of the overall entity that is machine, shareholder, public image, precedent and policy, etc, increases. And all of this is being enhanced by AI, so the decisions in the overall direction of the corporation and where it decides to focus its energy/power will steadily slip further out of human control. An entity like a corporation does take on a “life” of its own, so when this article talks about the 1892 case that says they have no soul, perhaps that should be reconsidered in a way. What is the purpose of these corporations? We need to remember that they should exist first to serve humanity overall, not to further their own increasingly shadowy interests.
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