The Great Exhibition was so popular that its profits funded several public museums still operating in the United Kingdom today, and the spectacle was so significant that the equivalent of one-third of the population of Great Britain came to London to see the exhibition. The Inauguration of the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851 We have much to learn from the analog technology innovations of an earlier century, 2 and there's hardly a better moment in time to consider than the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. Nor are we the first who must cope with the scale of the ethical implications of these developments. Yet we are not the first to deal with "disruptive," technology-driven change. When we talk about technology innovation, we tend to look forward, imagining our contemporary circumstances to be utterly unprecedented. Which desire prevails? And while we contemplate this question, the development of new apps continues. For example, at the point where they clash, the desire for the latest data-powered apps and the desire for fiercely protected privacy reveal significant ethical fault lines. We must come to grips with digital ethics, which I define simply as "doing the right thing at the intersection of technology innovation and accepted social values." This is a straightforward-enough definition however, given the speed of technology change and the relativity of social values, even a simple definition may be trickier than it seems. I believe we are at a crucial point in the evolution of technology. We need to find a way to pay attention to both the rapid technology innovations and the very real implications for the people who use them-or, as some would say, the people who are used by them. Meanwhile, fascinated by these developments, we may soon see the ground drop out from under us. These dazzling technologies capture our attention and inspire our imagination. New technologies, many that depend on private data or emerging artificial intelligence (AI) applications, are being rolled out with enthusiastic abandon. ![]() In 2020, I remember this story and see it as perhaps the perfect metaphor for the challenge of digital ethics. But most of the news stories were focused on the people involved and thus didn't see the bigger story about the place where humans and technology clash-or, in this case, crash. Many headlines made fun of the scraped-up fifteen-year-old. ![]() Some news stories are hard to forget, like the one from a decade ago about a teenager who was texting while walking and fell into an open manhole on the street. Higher education can and must lead the way. New technologies, especially those relying on artificial intelligence or data analytics, are exciting but also present ethical challenges that deserve our attention and action.
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