High Tech Society: IEEE's vision for ethical technological advancement

This is Deb Donig with Technically Human, a podcast about ethics and technology where I ask what it means to be human in the age of tech. Each week I interview industry leaders, thinkers, writers and technologists and I ask them about how they understand the relationship between humans and the technologies we create. We discuss how we can build a better vision for technology, one that represents the best of our human values. Today I'm speaking with Tom Cofflin. Tom Cofflin is the 2024 President and CEO of IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. He is an IEEE Life Fellow. The past president of IEEE USA, the past director of IEEE Region 6, the past chair of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE section, past chair of the consultants network of Silicon Valley and is also active with the Storage Networking Industry Association and Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Cofflin is also president of Cofflin Associates, a digital storage analyst and business technology consultant. He has over 40 years in the data storage industry with engineering and senior management positions at several companies. Cofflin Associates consults, publishes books and market and technology reports, including the media and entertainment storage report and an emerging memory report and puts on digital storage oriented events. He is a regular storage and memory contributor for Forbes.com, a media and entertainment organization website. Hi Tom. Hi Jim. So Tom, you're the CEO and president of IEEE, an organization that describes itself as the, and I'm going to quote from the website here, "The world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity." That's the end of the quote. Can you tell us a little bit about the organization and how you ended up working at the helm of it? What does IEEE do and what led you to want to get involved with the organization? So IEEE is the largest technical professional organization in the world. We do have over 460,000 members in over 190 countries. It creates important international standards, which basically allow industries to exist, runs over 2,000 conferences per year, publishes many of the world's technical peer reviewed literature, has local sections and chapters all over the world. I've been a member of the IEEE for over 45 years and it's an honor to have the opportunity to serve as a 2024 IEEE president. So I joined the IEEE initially as a graduate student many years ago. I had a BS in physics and I had joined the IEEE in order to get a discount to attend an IEEE conference, which was an Intermag conference in Boston. My original field is in Magnetics. I continued my membership after I graduated and participated in IEEE conferences, local IEEE events. First in the Minneapolis area where I went to school and then after moving to Boston, I participated in the local Boston section as well as society activity. And then I moved to Silicon Valley area in 1987. In 1992 I selected Chair of my local society chapter and a bunch of other stuff basically happened over the years since then. So I've held various roles in the IEEE. But being an IEEE volunteer leader has enabled me to refine my networking skills, my ability to give talks and allow me to create a number of long time relationships with people I've met in the course of being part of the IEEE. And if you ask long time IEEE members, you get different stories about why they have remained a member. But to me, IEEE is a community of technological professionals who help each other stay current, develop leadership skills and work together to make this a better world today and for our descendants. Well, I want to kind of dig into that a little bit because you said that you moved to Silicon Valley in 1987. I grew up in the Bay area, I won't say when I was born, but it was not that far away from when you moved here. And the area valley has gone undergone significant change as the tech ecosystem has picked up, become a financial center and has become, you might say, the new California gold rush. And I guess I'm wondering, I'd love to hear from you a little bit about what you think has changed in the context of engineering society and the kind of culture of engineering that you must have seen evolve over the time that you've been here and the time that you have been involved with IEEE. And in particular, I'm interested in thinking about this question via the many different priorities that have emerged over the past couple of decades, financial, technological, but also ethical. IEEE has, as it's calling card, the idea that it is not just a society where people get together to innovate so that they can create the newest, greatest technological accomplishment, but also as a space where people do so in order to specifically serve the benefit of humanity. Can you talk a little bit about what you've seen in the landscape of Silicon Valley and IEEE? As it relates to that fundamental premise in the calling card that IEEE sells itself with, again, that idea of benefiting humanity and how do these different incentives and different priorities cultivate or challenge that idea of technology or developing technology to benefit humanity? Well, there's a lot of stuff in your question there. So I'll try to address some of those. I've been originally I was in Santa Cruz. I've worked at C.G. Technology that was based at that time in Scotts Valley and then I moved into into the South Bay, live in San Jose now, some years later. It's, first of all, it's a really interesting place to live because so much activity has happened here, both hardware, software, critical manufacturing and design, like semiconductors, why it's called Silicon Valley, have come out of here and it's helped to drive the development of technologies that, you know, it technologies a tool that can be used for good or for ill, but in terms of the good it's created, it has revolutionized the way we communicate, the sort of things we can do with people anywhere in the world that we never could do before. It's enabled us to be able to make life better for many people to improve healthcare, to have things you wear in your body that can help you to monitor how, how your heart is doing here, you know, for people to be able to work in ways they never could before to relieve physical labor so that people can automate a lot of things that would be repetitive, which are boring for human beings or require strenuous physical labor, which can hurt people, you know, over the long term, we found ways of new ways of doing things we'd never could before. So I think it's been an exciting opportunity to live in this area to be exposed to the kind of thoughts, the way that people work around here, a lot less of, in my opinion, compared to other parts of the world, there's less focus on hierarchy and more on clever ideas, new insights, new ways of doing things, you know, breaking, breaking the old approaches and finding new ways of accomplishing stuff and especially of applying engineering and technology in general, on important problems and creating both I'd like to think new opportunities, new ways of creating wealth for people to have better lives and for more people to be able to benefit and also hopefully amazed by which we can solve some of the world's most pressing problems. I mean, I want to push you a little bit on this and I hope in doing so I'm not being adversarial, but the phrase benefit of humanity is the variety of models, a variety of proposals that a technology is inherently doing good or helping the world, that I hear quite frequently from tech CEOs or innovation leaders or people who are trying to sell a technology that has questionable benefit for humanity, but an obvious profit incentive under the guise of being in some way for the benefit of humanity. When I think about this, I always think about that Silicon Valley HBO show which has as its six season an episode called Tethics in which the villain of the show, a character named Gavin Bilson, proposes a "tethical manifesto" which has all of these kind of meaningless slogans that are attached to it and leveraging these kind of meaningless slogans tech companies can maneuver toward their own profit incentive without really having to specifically spell out what that benefit might actually be in a way that is subject to evaluation or scrutiny or any form of metrics whatsoever. And I see this not just in the world of fiction in Silicon Valley the show, but oftentimes in real life in the valley as well. I think that so many tech products can be sold as benefiting humanity because the words themselves are so baggy that they can be put to service of basically any purpose or any form of technology. And I'll just give a couple of examples where I see this happening. I'm not asking you to comment on any specific individuals here, but I think it's important to be able to observe how this actually plays out. Elon Musk has said that by buying Twitter, he would be creating a technology that he would reinvent as fundamentally helping humanity, conversed to his claim, "X is one of the leading causes of disinformation and misinformation, circulation and toxic speech." Palantir, which has been involved with many practices involving civil rights violations, also described itself similarly as, and here's a direct quote from what Palantir understands itself to be doing, or at least claims to be doing, working for the good of civilization. I hope that you see my point. And what I take away from this is that when companies do this, they can make broad claims about doing good without ever having to articulate what good they actually accomplish. They sidestep the public's ability to evaluate whether or not we're on the same page about what good actually looks like. And in this way, it becomes impossible to hold these companies up to any specific standard about what their work actually accomplishes, and they could use this claim to push their technology forward to justify somewhat questionable actions. And finally, the vague rhetoric claiming to work toward the benefit of humanity also sometimes can make criticism seem like anti-progress, and critics with legitimate critiques can be dismissed as opposing human progress rather than specific practices. And I guess my question is, and again, I'm not asking you to comment on any of these individuals or any of the technological products that they have developed. But I'm wondering whether you can define what you mean in very specific terms by the benefit of humanity and what interview technological innovation is and must do in order to service that benefit for humanity. Who's humanity? What benefit? How do we measure this? So again, I'm not going to comment on individual's or companies. I will say some things about the IEEE, which are the means by which we try to accomplish our mission. So IEEE and its members are tempted to inspire global community in order to innovate for a better tomorrow. We do this through a highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities. IEEE is a trusted voice for engineering computing and technology information around the globe. It's also a leader in engineering and technology education, providing resources for pre-university, university and continuing professional education. And we offer ongoing, continuing professional education for practitioners and engineering faculty through platforms such as the IEEE Learning Network. Also we are a nonprofit. And so our work is supposed to provide value to the community. In this year we have been developing our strategic plan in fact for 2025 to 2030, which is focusing on how we will pursue our mission over the next five years. The mission being benefiting humanity. Yes. So what are some of the things that come up? What are some of the deliberations that you consider when you think about whether or not projects that people are bringing to IEEE qualify as benefiting humanity? I mean, I understand what you say when you talk about having standards and verification systems that corroborate the factuality and the demonstrable working of a particular technology, whether or not it's functional, whether or not it does what it says it's going to do. But how do you evaluate whether it's benefiting humanity? I could say the things that we do that I believe are benefiting humanity. You know, first of all, what are the kind of things we ought to be doing? We should be inclusive, accessible and address the needs of diverse populations. We should be able to adapt and evolve to a changing, a rapidly changing world and be a source of information that helps you to make better decisions. And we have multiple areas in which we try to support the organization such as for more information, you can go to iTripley.org. But as the world's largest technical, professional organization, we have many ways where people can get involved with technical and local communities. Those communities are active participants in research and authorship. They put on conferences on important topics and also have important conversations about today's most relevant technical topics locally and globally. Now, on the conferences side, you know, in events we do over 2,000 conferences a year of worldwide. We curate cutting edge content for all the technical fields of interest within the iTripley. We have publications approximately a third of the world's technical literature in the electrical engineering computing and electronics. On our standards, we're a leading developer of international standards that underpin many of today's telecommunications, information technology and power generation products and services. And often we're the central source of standardization at a broad range of emerging technologies. Our standards association has an active portfolio of nearly 1,144 standards. There's more than 1,000 projects under development. It includes the, for instance, the 802 standards for local metropolitan, other communication networks, including Ethernet and wireless LAN, commonly referred to as Y5. So basically, a lot of the communication that the world is able to do runs in iTripley standards by having continued education and professional development hours that we offer. We help our members meet their continuing education requirements and to develop products and services in support of those efforts. Also, I want to point out something kind of mentioning that we do, we have activities such as what's called ethically line design for intelligent autonomous systems that basically started in 2015 in our standards association and other parts of iTripley that we hope will result in more ethical implementation of artificial intelligence, provide guidance on reducing bias, increasing transparency, things like that. So that last part is fascinating. You talk about reducing bias and the kind of ethical frameworks that iTripley is helping to develop in order to evaluate the efficacy and the ethics of a particular innovation. I'm wondering if you talk a little bit about what kinds of harms, not just benefits to humanity, but what kinds of harms do you think the kind of society developed in iTripley and kind of camaraderie and the kind of standards and evaluative metrics that iTripley has developed? What kind of harms do they, in your view, prevent? Can you give me an example of something that you think that your ethical standards and your evaluative frameworks and the kind of scrutiny that you provide prohibits or averse? Well, I mean, iTripley has a code of ethics is initially created in 1912, you know, but it basically, you know, says that we should strive to be true, you know, in the things we say, we find the truth that we shouldn't take brimes, various other things that basically, to try to have ethical standards that reflect upon, if you will, kind of what being a technologist should be about, which is, understanding the laws of nature and the way that the world works to develop critical thinking, the ability of being able to think logically about things, evaluate them, and, you know, follow the scientific method for determining if something that you may develop hypotheses and then test to see if those are true and that, you know, it search for knowledge as a continual search. In fact, it's something, I think, that defines a low we are as human beings, especially some of the best of what we are as human beings is the idea to try to understand the world around us and to understand how we can use that knowledge about the world around us and about ourselves in order to be able to do things which can benefit us. I mean, I want to just challenge that one with one more dimension of thought before moving on to talk about the upcoming change to the iTripley's Medal of Honor, which is that, you know, a lot of people have pursued knowledge to the ends of discovering more about our physical world or the ways in which we can innovate, the things that we can do with technologies without necessarily resulting in something that benefits humanity. I'm reminded when I observed that of the Nazi scientists, right? Or some of the worst science that was. I wouldn't call it a scientist. Well, they certainly thought that they were scientists, right? So there is, I think, an understanding objectively of what science is and then at different periods of time, people can believe that what they're doing is in the service of science or is science and later we realize that it was actually quite horrid and abusive. But I wonder, you know, with that question in mind, is there another principle beyond what we can know or what we can create that iTripley particular elevates as a principle of innovation that directs this idea of pursuing knowledge or pursuing innovation toward innovations that can objectively be measured to contribute to human well-being or human flourishing? Well, you know, in iTripley, we are supposed to be involved in what we call public imperatives and that definition is things that can provide benefit value to people, to communities. And, you know, we strive, you know, we're working with human beings, human beings such as we are, we're all, we're many of us. We are sort of works in progress, you know, we're part of whatever it is we're going to become by the means, by the practices we use to get there. So I think by trying to develop standards in ways in which we can do things and define them in ways that seem to us as human beings that they provide the possibility of making judgments on what is good and what is not good and what is able to benefit us or at least we should be trying to see if these things benefit us so that we can make progress. We can do things that will generally help to advance humanity. You know, I think it's hard to argue that technology has not helped us in many ways that it's not enabled more people to live and ever did before for people to do things they never could before. folks to have opportunities that never existed. So we've got that, and you know, and that balances out to some extent, you know, if we strive to do that, hopefully that balances out, and that it shows the best of what it is to be a human being. And that is what an organization like ours, I believe, is trying to aspire to is how can we best to accomplish that? Tell me a little bit about the IEEE Medal of Honor. What is the award? How do you select authorities? What is the award recognized? And what is the criteria for the award? Sure, it's the highest IEEE Award that's bestowed for a remarkable society changing achievements in technology, engineering and science. The IEEE Medal of Honor recipients have advanced technology, have advanced technology, and they have changed our world in revolutionary ways. So it's been given for such extraordinary innovations as a creation of the internet, the development of life-saving medical device technologies, including the CATSCANT, MRI, ultrasound, and pacemakers, as well as transistors and semiconductors. Technologies that are at the heart of modern electronics and computing, and basically we use every day. The IEEE Medal of Honor may be given to an individual or a team of up to three people who have made exceptional contributions or had extraordinary careers in technology, engineering, and science. The criteria for the IEEE Medal of Honor consideration include the significance of the achievement, the originality, its impact on society, its impact on the profession, publications, and patents relating to that achievement. Can you share a little bit about the history of the award? Who are some of the former awardees? I know you mentioned CATSCANT and the internet. Those are relatively incisive and important interventions, but who are some of the former awardees of note in particular? And what did they accomplish to receive the recognition? Well, it's a really long list. We want to go into everything we've given this award since 1917. And the most important contributors who this field have received that medal in recognition of their critical laurels and laying the foundations of our modern electrical world. So a few recent and past IEEE Medal of Honor recipients, including IEEE Lifel's Robert E. Conn, who has awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor this year, 2024, for Pioneer and Technical and Leadership Contributions, and Packet Communication Technologies, and the foundations of the internet. Conn is President, CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, and while working as a program manager in the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Information Processing Offices, Techniques Offices, 1973, Conn, along with Vinton, known as Vint Cerf, designed a transmission control protocol, TCP, and the internet protocol IP. The TCP manages data packets sent over the internet, ensuring that they don't get lost, are received in the proper order, and are reassembled at their destination correctly. The IP manages the addressing and forwarding of data to and from its proper destinations, together to make up the internet's core architecture and enable computers to connect and exchange information. Vint Cerf actually won the award in 2023, the Medal of Honor for Co-creating the internet architecture, providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society's critical infrastructure. Cerf is Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, he's known as one of the fathers of the internet. With Robert Conn mentioned before, he conceived the TCP/IP suite of that permits the transformation of the original ARP-NEP, which was a networking system that existed before the modern internet into today's internet. He also formed the internet configuration control board, which evolved into the internet architecture board, which is a body responsible today for technical oversight of the internet architecture and standards process. In 2022, Assad Modney won the Medal of Honor for pioneering contributions to the development and commercialization of innovative sensing and systems technologies, and for distinguished research leadership. He led the development commercialization of the gyro chip in inexpensive inertial measurement sensor that was the first such device to be incorporated into automobiles, enabling electronics to build the control systems to detect skidding and operate the brakes to prevent rollover accidents. In the five-year period spanning from 2011 to 2015, with these devices being built into all new cars, the system saved over 7,000 lives in the United States alone, based upon data from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The device went on to serve as the heart of stability, control systems, and commercial and private aircraft. U.S. missile guidance systems and travel demars as part of the Pathfinder, sojourner Rover. I understand that the IEEE award recently increased to $2 million. I can list on zero fingers how many medals of honor in the humanities provide $2 million as an award. What's the reason for the increase? And what do you want to accomplish in raising the award amount? So first of all, as I mentioned briefly before, the Medal of Honor was established in 1917, and in the subsequent 100+ years innovators and advancements in technology engineering and science have had an increasingly profound impact on our world. So we're significantly increasing the IEEE Medal of Honor, a monetary prize in 2025 to $2 million because basically we are at an inflection point globally where technology engineering and science have become integral to addressing challenges such as climate change and positively moving our world forward. So in recognition of the extraordinary individuals and the work that they have done to benefit humanity, we are elevating the IEEE Medal of Honor to its rightful place, we believe, as one of the world's most prestigious technology focused prizes and awards. In this move underscores, IEEE's role as a public charity whose mission is to advance technology for the benefit of humanity and recognizing people who helped to make that happen is an integral part of that. And is the money really about recognition and raising the spectrum of recognition? Or is there a hope? And I don't know that this is the case, but it seems like it would be a kind of ethical imperative to do this, to provide people who are perhaps early a stage or working on something interesting, but need the funding or the finances to pursue what they're working on, an opportunity to pursue that without some of the baggage, adventure capital or without having to sell their idea as it were in the terrain of a Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, go to hackathons, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and participate in those things. Is the impetus and the ultimate objective of raising the award to confer additional recognition and prestige? Or is it more aligned with the idea of helping to catapult the innovation that somebody who might not otherwise be able to work on a technology that seems promising would then have it their fingertips in order to move forward with their working on? So, first of all, is meant for recognition of accomplishments possible? One possibility is that money may end up supporting projects that otherwise might not be supported as well. There's a possibility of that that money may be used for additional pursuing a public good of new ideas and technologies in activities that could have a beneficial impact on human kind. Okay. A CEO and president of the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. I wonder if you had developed any observations or had had any thoughts about why so many technical innovations, innovations that I really believe were designed initially at least with the intentions of providing a benefit to humans, or at least not harming people, can go so wrong. What happens in your view? What goes wrong with people who maybe are in early their early career an awareness of the oath that you have mentioned in terms of ethical codes who have a sensibility who genuinely want to do good and then get caught up in what sometimes is called mission drift or at other times end up creating a product that is well intentioned and yet still ends up causing harm. What goes wrong in the view? Well, first, I think we need to recognize that the vast majority of technical innovations have moved us forward as a society and they've changed lives for the better. They've created new opportunities. They've helped people to live longer, better lives, you know, a lot of things that have done good. But when you're developing innovative technologies, there's always a period of trial and error in your libel in the course of following up with something that's new, discover things you didn't know before. That's all part of the process of making new things. And the more often than not, we learn through these early iterations and hopefully we can then can use that information to help improve the end result. So we refine things, ideas, concepts, the way we do things over time. And I think in order to do this, we need to foster a culture of ethical innovation, encourage collaboration, understanding the risks and the impacts of technical advancements and then to make informed and research back decisions based upon that. How do you do that? Well, I think there's a number of things could help us to accomplish that. First of all, I think we need to promote diversity and the inclusion of all different perspectives in terms of understanding of technology and of its uses. We need to establish clear guidelines, policies and promote the ethics for technological advancements and ensure there's a level of public transparency and accountability and that we look at and we promote the researching of both long and short term impacts on society, up to I understand that IEEE is a leading developer of international standards that underpin many of today's telecommunications Information technology and power generation products and services you've just spoken about a few of them earlier in our conversation And now I've had many debates with technologists about the proposal to have engineers specifically and technologists broadly take what we might call a Professional oath similar to the kind of professional oath that doctors for example take with the Hippocratic oath the historical ethical pledge Traditionally taken by physicians in which they have an kind of educational curricular integration of this oath into medical school curriculum in a fairly standardized form Now I understand that there are many differences between the roles and social functions of doctors and technologists but with the proliferation of technological structures governing our world and their increasing intimacy into our lives Daily routines or homes and often even our bodies and the ways in which our health and well-being and safety is increasingly governed by objects that technologists design produce and sell I think that there's an increasing rationale for or a case to be made for the formalization of this kind of education including perhaps an acknowledged commitment or oath by practitioners to have certain ethical ways You've talked about an ethical code of conduct but I think that an oath is a bit of a different animal when it comes to developing and ensuring an institutionalizing that kind of commitment perhaps even as well providing recourse and remedy when people behave in ways or create technologies that transgresses this kind of oath. What do you think of this idea? Well, first of all just to mention as you did that we have out of code of ethics since 2012 which by triply members are supposed to adhere to also I think that there is activity going on in for instance in universities where they teach technology to also look at ethical issues and technology I think there's becoming greater trends of doing that that I'm from perspective I have observed we do this in a number of ways again promoting diversity and unique perspectives to try to have understanding of technology and implications from as many sides we can to try to make that happen to establish clear guidelines policies and ethics for technological advancements ensure there's a level of public transparency again accountability and again researching you know the long and short term impacts on society these all are things that I think may help us to be able to to have technologists think more ethically you know or have ethics is an important element in their decisions in the things that they do. But what about specifically the idea of the oath and just to provide a little bit of context for the question that I'm asking here I think that many technologists and indeed not I don't mean to logist question or this accusation specifically at people in the tech sector but anybody who stands to gain from something makes a calculated gamble about the risks and the benefit to them and the consequences of pursuing something that might have a measurable benefit to them. Financially in terms of their career etc you know I sit on a couple of boards of some companies that may allow me some insider trading information I make a calculated decision about well I might possibly gain some financial benefit for myself where I to use that information but there's a pretty steep penalty if I get caught and the penalty for me as somebody who is a person working in an academic context on ethics specifically and as a person who has a lot to lose from the consequences of that where I to get caught multiplied by the levels of scrutiny that might be applied to somebody who sits on boards leaves me to say you know whatever benefit that I may get from this it's not worth the risk and I think that most people when they are working in this area minus some sort of personal set of ethical standards that I'm going to say that people may or may not institute any given moment given an opportunity do that kind of algebra as they think about whether or not they're going to pursue something that may cause harm and one of I think the benefits of the Hippocratic oath is that when doctors take this not only are they educated by the practices that are entertained in that oath as to a guidance about what to do in any particular situation and a kind of ethical standard but there's some level of accountability when they fail to uphold the obligations of that oath as well and I can see the case for a kind of standardized oath taking system that allows people to have a understanding of and a commitment to as well as accountability to the standards that they themselves have formally and I think that that's part of the oath formally accepted as well as an opportunity to enforce and hold people accountable when they transgress that oath. Now I think that critics of oath taking and I include myself in this as well would say that oftentimes oaths become you know a new form of McCarthyism when you have to commit to a certain kind of code that may be evolving or may not necessarily be universally in the way that they are being taught. So I think that a universally accepted one or where critics might not have an opportunity to challenge those kinds of of codes which can become the case in any regulatory environment those codes can become a little bit McCarthyistic so I wonder if you can react to that in some sense how do you feel about the idea of an oath in particular and what that might open up in terms of moving people working on technologies toward more forthright again algebra as to whether or not they're willing to do that. They're willing to do something that might be harmful versus the kind of the costs of of instituting oath system. Well I think you've got you're touching on some of the biggest the biggest challenges well you know some of the biggest questions in general you know as if you don't try new things you will never find new things on the other hand if you find that there's a harm in something that you that you know about that explore that and understand that and try to take that into account in terms of doing something. So the oaths are in my opinion if generally people don't have ethics or some ethical basis and the things that they do you may try to legislate things but the biggest means by which I think we keep from hurting each other is that we feel it's not right to do so that it's a personal ethical decisions that are being made. So the decisions in the course that they're things can try to codify that and that's what the hip-cratic oath I think was meant for and what the code of ethics and the IEEE is and there are methods of an IEEE that they try to enforce those if there's especially egregious violation of those principles but it's a hard issue you know it's and one which requires I think ethics and philosophy understanding the broader impacts of things that one does. So it's always evolving new ideas, new insights and the way in which we need to treat information and implement it you know we need to keep our eye on trying to do the best good from that because one thing for our organization right strictly that is our mission is advancing technology for humanity. Thank you very much for helping me showcase my weekly PSA to put philosophy and ethics classes into STEM curriculum. I'm wondering about the other form of enforcement or accountability that we talk about when we discuss how to guide technological innovators and technological innovations toward a more human service oriented or human benefit oriented for performance and that is of course regulation or legislation. How do you think about calls for regulation or legislation that might serve to channel technological innovation toward more ethical or responsible modes of development and toward ends that better serve human values. Okay so regulations can help set clear standards for ethical practices to ensure that technologists prioritize societies well being they can also foster accountability, highlighting the impact of technology and its service from more sustainable practices however if you're going to make regulations and such activities it's also necessary to understand the technology itself to understand how it works the implications of it and I triply we make some effort in these areas that we have public policy activities we have committees that need to talk about important activities and say AI or generation things that kind within parts of IEEE and they can help shape practical and effective public policies so I'd like to think that we are also making some effort to help with public policies that makes sense that we'll do more good than harm because there's also possibility if regulations are not done the right way that they could hinder progress hinder things that could be good for humanity. So if we're covering bodies in existence do you think have the competence or if they don't have the competence which governing bodies that don't yet exist but that you would want to see come into existence to create effective governance should we look toward in creating the kind of regulatory or legislative proposals that you've articulated, especially in an age where tech products. So if you're in a digital space operate and require international connectivity and are generated by companies that operate internationally how do we regulate tech in a way that is both consequential and functional without hindering innovation. like international regulatory bodies, partnerships or agreements, tech ethics boards, regulatory frameworks, and even trade associations, for example, they can be ways to regulate technology in a way that is consequential and functional, but also recognizes because tech industry moves so quickly, there won't be a one-size-fits-all approach to regulating emerging tech. It depends upon the tech, it depends on what's going on. For instance, in our IEEE standards association, which creates rules about, for instance, traditionally, it's create rules for interoperability of equipment that works together, for example. But we've also been doing work on ethics and sustainability topics there, and they regularly collaborate with international organizations to discuss these issues and how to address them. We also have a within the US, we have IEEE USA, which is involved in public policy activities in Washington, D.C., and we're also trying to expand our resources where it makes sense for global public policy that is outside of the United States as well. What principles of legislation or regulation do you think are most effective in helping to guide products toward an ethical and human benefit-oriented institution? I think the ones that will be the most effective the ones that recognize and understand the technology and take that into account in terms of what they try to do. If you just lay down, just mandates without understanding the technology, you may very well make mistakes. You may very well hinder rather than help for advancing humanity. But what about some of the principles? For example, I'm thinking of the principle of transparency, which many critics of the way that the tech industry currently operates for ground and elevate as an important principle, again independent of any particular piece of legislation that would in their view provide a mechanism of ethics or a mechanism of better practices across the industry. Are there principles particularly important to pursue? Well, you know, a part of it is to understand the technology and understand the implications of the technology, understand how it works, what can be done with it, and I think the general principles to try to avoid the things that could be damaging, that could be bad, and emphasize the things that could be good. But you can't do that well unless you understand the technology itself and it's interaction with everything else that's going on around. Referring back to the standards activity on ethical and intelligent autonomous systems, there's an activity there that's trying to look at all of the different aspects of the way that say AI might be used in the issues that come up with some recommendations, maybe how to deal with things like bias in the data that use for training or transparency of an artificial intelligence model. Understand if it's, have a better idea of understanding what it actually is doing and when it is, when it makes good decisions versus bad decisions, for example. So these are kind of things that I think that if you, if you get people that are as on a technological topic that are knowledgeable about the technology that are working to try to find the best ways of using these things that working together collaboratively, I think that's another important element. They can come up with guidelines that can help in terms of steering technology towards doing more more good than harm. Well, I wanted to just play one more attempt at devil's advocate, which is that you know, you look at something like the performance of Congress when faced with regulating digital technologies and some of the lack of awareness about how these technologies operate or indeed how users typically interact with these technologies that has really hamstrung the ability of Congress to both have credibility in the eyes of the tech sector, as well as effectiveness in terms of creating legislation regulation that promotes public safety and hinders public wrong doing or wrong doing by companies that are creating these technologies. And I take that point, but you know, the Congress that we have in the United States effectively legislates and rules on another area of the tech sector regularly, that is to say, for example, the car industry or the auto industry. And my guess is that there are few people in Congress who have a auto mechanics background. I could be wrong on this, but I have not to my knowledge come across Congress. Work hard design your background. Yeah, and so yet at the same time, these members of the House of Representatives and the Senate create public safety rules all the time, independent of their knowledge of the particulars of how vehicles are put together, such as effective safety belt rules. And so it doesn't seem to me imperative in this area of the tech sector that legislators have the kind of in-depth knowledge that Congress is frequently scrutinized for not having when it comes to regulating in particular digital technologies in that particular industry. And while I understand the importance of expertise and having informed points of views that can craft effective legislation with the emphasis being on the efficacy, I also wonder whether or not some of the critique of Congress is misguided at best and at worst actual attempts to discredit any regulatory environment or legislative attempt. Can you react to that or respond to that in some way? How do you think about the need to balance expertise in this one particular area in order to craft legislation with the acknowledgement that Congress frequently passes safety regulations across many other areas of the tech arena without necessarily having that particular in-depth expertise? Well, I suspect that they don't do it just on a whim though. I mean, they're basing their decisions upon some kind of analysis studies and materials created. And IEEE is involved in public, for instance, there's part of IEEE called IEEE USA. And IEEE USA is supposed to do things for benefiting members in the US, but it also is involved in public policy. And so there actually we have lobbyists in Washington that we have volunteer groups that meet on public policy ideas. And particularly what we'd be focusing on is new and novel technologies developments say in the power grid, you know, a more decentralized power grid. How do you manage that? You know, what's the good way to rules and regulations of things that sort of we have more renewable resources used, for example? Or maybe on artificial intelligence? So we actually have people that talk to congressional aids because you usually don't get to talk to the to the congressperson to inform them of things that we think that are important to take into account in terms of legislation and regulations might be developed. Another thing that IEEE USA does, which is interesting is they actually have something called congressional visits day. When IEEE members, they can create appointments for IEEE members to have time with their congressional offices. As constituents to meet with their congressional offices, usually again, not with the actual congressperson, but with their aids, but to be able to talk to them about things that matter to them as well. So I think within the IEEE, we do we are involved in efforts to try to inform public policy on technical issues for which we have people that are knowledgeable. And that also makes effort to bring constituents who are IEEE members to be able to meet with their congresspeople to talk about things that are important to them, which may include some of these public policy activities, but maybe things that are more specific to their individual region or interests, for example. So I think you don't want to just make regulations. My own feeling is you're not going to make regulations just out of the blue. You're going to base it on some kind of understanding of what works and what doesn't work in case of safety belts. There are studies that have shown that they prevent access, for example. So even though they may not, it's pretty well understood, the information is out there, but in case of new technology, there's things people have never run into before. And people that are knowledgeable in these areas, especially they come from diverse backgrounds and understandings, discussing and coming up with ideas, may be able to help to inform better public policies that governments or other organizations might make. That's really helpful. I think one of the hindrances or challenges when it comes to crafting the kind of informed policy that you're talking about is that while in the context of the regulatory environment around cars, you have things like police reports that look at accidents and are able to assess and evaluate the reasons behind the accidents and provide that to researchers or to lawyers to be able to do due diligence on the causes of those accidents and what kind of safety measures would be appropriate or cautious. A lot of the digital space is very tightly guarded. Companies very frequently do not make their data available to researchers. And as a result of that, you either if you're researching this have to depend on the good will of companies to provide whatever data they feel they want to provide for research, or you have to make somewhat educated guesses that may or may not have anything to do with what the actual technology is doing in terms of its inner workings or the consequences of that. We have some knowledge, but only because of whistleblowers who have come out and said here are the internal documents that demonstrate some of the harms and some of the knowledge about those harms is some of the failures to institute safety measures. And out of that we have been able to say which forms of data we might be able to access to identifying, demonstrate those harms as well as what kinds of safety measures might be possible. and how to institute those. but the lack of transparency, I think, is a real hindrance to accomplishing the kinds of goals that you're working on. Can you talk a little bit about what you think needs to change? Well, I can talk about some interesting things going on and I triply, I triply, of course, is a major publisher of technical information, but we've also been expanding out into other areas as well, where people can provide their code, maybe this is part of their research. We have something called code-ocean, where they can put their code and other people can make use of it. We also have something called dataport. And dataport currently has 11.4 million users, and it's basically a repository for people's data of all different types, you know, for research and other purposes. So we are in the business of trying to provide information that could be used for, for instance, to verify someone else to use someone else's data to verify a result. You know, that someone did, that they agree with that information that he used the data to do that. If you include negative and positive results, it can also help people to find out things that, at least going at the way that was done in some research, did not yield results, and so doing something different, so people can be more effective in terms of the activities that they do. But it may also provide data that could help to understand depending upon the kind of data that we get into the dataport. They could try to understand things that are going on around scientific data. I don't know if there's any government data that they put into dataport, but you know, it's kind of a tool that could provide access to information that could be used for making important decisions and understandings, and especially I think, and this is an area where AI may be a plain important role. One of the things I've been working with IEEE is investing in new products and services, some which could be playing artificial intelligence, IEEE content, which could allow us to create new insights, new understandings, to be able to answer questions, look for trends, things like that that could be valuable to people. I'm realizing at the stage that the conversation we've been having about regulation and legislation has led us to be a little bit American centric in our qualifications, and I wanted to also acknowledge that IEEE has 460,000 members across 190 countries, so maybe we can expand our overview to include the membership in those countries as well, and how this kind of international collaboration, this international community, the membership within that international community, is playing a role in creating a global ecology for responsible innovation. Can you talk a little bit about the global nature of the membership, and what that may add to our ability to think about an overall ethical ecosystem in the context of tech? Sure. Well, so personally, first of all, I've been actually traveling to many countries in this year, as well as IEEE president in Asia. I just recently got back from Africa, Europe, and of course North America. We have people all over the world, 190 countries, 460,000 members. We have 171,000 student members, so we also have a big impact on the next generation of people in technology. And I think this diversity of community membership allows us to bring together diverse perspectives and to facilitate the exchange of ideas from many different backgrounds, many different, you know. That can inform, I believe, more responsible innovation and take into account more of the various factors of the way that people are, of the way that they live and work with each other. And I think the diverse membership also promotes, especially diverse membership in terms of the things that are within the IEEE. We have technologies that, or people involved, technologies from understanding the bottom of the ocean to the reaches of outer space, from nanotechnology to biotechnology, from computer hardware to software, just some of the things. And this promotes what I think is increasingly important, is interdisciplinary collaboration, work between different disciplines to understand problems, find new solutions, find new opportunities. And I think it leads to valuable feedback on new technologies and new things that people want to do. And also, you know, somebody from Silicon Valley is myself. I'm hoping that we're helping to spread, you know, understanding the value of innovation in terms of being able to change the world, make things better, ideally to make things better for other people to provide opportunities. And also, I think that those communities can help to advocate for responsible policies, encourage accountability, and ensure that new innovations align with local societal needs, that something that works in Silicon Valley may not be perfect for rural Africa, for example. How can we create things that technologies approaches things that are appropriate for the kind of things that people are doing that fit into the needs of an individual society, of another part of the earth, and what we live with, for instance, I live in, for example. I think we have time for one last question. What steps do you think are most critical for us to take in your view in pursuit of a more ethical and responsible environment for our technological innovation? What needs to happen? Well, first of all, you need to bring together the people that understand the technological innovation and bringing them together to actively identifying, address potential ethical concerns early in the innovation process. Remember I was talking about ethical design of intelligent autonomous systems is looking how do we design things so that with the intent that they do good. And conduct impact assessments, things of that sort, and to promote collaborations, transparency, accountability, and communications. It helps to further these goals, and in the case of IEEE, to advance our mission of technology for humanity. Thank you very much, Tom. Thank you, Deb. [Music] [Music]