Bringing Ethics Back To Business

Tamara Pupic

entrepreneur.com
Originally posted 30 Dec 19

In the business world, detecting, preventing, and remedying compliance issues, or a lack thereof, has evolved from academic research, investigative reporting, and businesses applying best practice initiatives, often clumsily, into a niche sector - regtech,  a new sector for ‘treps to develop innovative technologies to address challenges involving regulations.

It is considered the most promising part of the global enterprise governance, risk, and compliance (EGRC) market, whose size has grown rapidly, from US$27.8 billion in 2018 to an expected $64.2 billion by 2025, according to a report by Grand View Research. In the MENA region, transparency and ethical compliance have been at the forefront of shareholder and board of directors’ discussions, especially since non-compliance cases at leading firms have started making headlines just about every other week.

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According to the leadership team, Alethia solves several of the main current challenges in compliance. Firstly, it addresses the lack of anonymity in traditional compliance hotlines and emails “People are naturally skeptical when it comes to technology and personal data,” Roets says. “We instill confidence by requiring no personal information when downloading the app, and we don’t track IP addresses. All interactions are protected with SSL encryption using digitally signed tokens to ensure 100% anonymity for the whistleblower to safeguard against any form of retaliation.” Secondly, the app urges organizations to try different reporting channels. “Most still rely on outdated anonymous telephone hotlines, but in a digital world, when we think about workforce demographics, GDPR compliance, cost implications, and the overall decline in telephone usage, hotlines are no longer best practice,” Roets says. “Other channels include intranet solutions, cumbersome online forms, or personal interactions with HR or ombudsmen. Unfortunately, these offer little by way of a follow-up feature, call handlers’ subjectivity can impact the quality of reports, and most importantly, they all present a real or perceived threat of compromising the reporter’s identity.”

The info is here.

Morals Ex Machina: Should We Listen To Machines For Moral Guidance?

Michael Klenk
3QuarksDaily.com
Originally posted August 12, 2019

Here are two excerpts:

The prospects of artificial moral advisors depend on two core questions: Should we take ethical advice from anyone anyway? And, if so, are machines any good at morality (or, at least, better than us, so that it makes sense that we listen to them)? I will only briefly be concerned with the first question and then turn to the second question at length. We will see that we have to overcome several technical and practical barriers before we can reasonably take artificial moral advice.

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The limitation of ethically aligned artificial advisors raises an urgent practical problem, too. From a practical perspective, decisions about values and their operationalisation are taken by the machine’s designers. Taking their advice means buying into preconfigured ethical settings. These settings might not agree with you, and they might be opaque so that you have no way of finding out how specific values have been operationalised. This would require accepting the preconfigured values on blind trust. The problem already exists in machines that give non-moral advice, such as mapping services. For example, when you ask your phone for the way to the closest train station, the device will have to rely on various assumptions about what path you can permissibly take and it may also consider commercial interests of the service provider. However, we should want the correct moral answer, not what the designers of such technologies take that to be.

We might overcome these practical limitations by letting users input their own values and decide about their operationalisation themselves. For example, the device might ask users a series of questions to determine their ethical views and also require them to operationalise each ethical preference precisely. A vegetarian might, for instance, have to decide whether she understands ‘vegetarianism’ to encompass ‘meat-free meals’ or ‘meat-free restaurants.’ Doing so would give us personalised moral advisors that could help us live more consistently by our own ethical rules.

However, it would then be unclear how specifying our individual values, and their operationalisation improves our moral decision making instead of merely helping individuals to satisfy their preferences more consistently.

The info is here.

'Ethics Bots' and Other Ways to Move Your Code of Business Conduct Beyond Puffery

Michael Blanding
Harvard Business Week
Originally posted May 14, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Even if not ready to develop or deploy such technologically advanced solutions, companies can still make their ethics codes more intuitive, interactive, and practical for day-to-day decision-making, Soltes says. That may mean reducing the number of broad-brush value statements and uninspired clip-art, instead making the document more concise in describing practical guidelines for the company’s employees.

He also recommends thinking beyond the legal department to bring in other areas of the company, such as marketing, communications, or consumer behavior specialists, to help design a code that will be understandable to employees. Uber, for example, rolled out a mobile app-focused version of its ethics code to better serve its employees, who are younger and more tech savvy.

Lastly, Soltes advises that firms not be afraid to experiment. An ethics code shouldn’t be a monolith, but rather a living document that can be adapted to the expanding needs of a firm and its employees. After rolling out a policy to a subgroup of employees, for example, companies should evaluate how the code is actually being used in practice and how it can be further refined and improved.

That kind of creativity can help companies stay away from the scrutiny of regulators and avoid negative headlines. “Ultimately, the goal should not simply be to just create a legal document, but instead a valuable tool that helps cultivate the kind of behavior and culture the firm wants to support on a day-to-day basis,” Soltes says.

The info is here.

An Improved Virtual Hope Box: An App for Suicidal Patients

Principal Investigator: Nigel Bush, Ph.D.
Organization: National Center for Telehealth & Technology

One of the key approaches in treating people who are depressed and thinking about suicide is to help them come up with reasons to go on living, and one of the ways that mental health specialists have traditionally done this is to work with their patients to create a “hope box”—a collection of various items that remind the patients that their lives are meaningful and worth living. The items can be anything from photos of loved ones and certificates of past achievements to lists of future aspirations, CDs of relaxing music, and recordings of loved ones offering inspirations thoughts. The hope box itself can take various forms: a real wooden box or shoe box, a manila envelope, a plastic bag, or anything else that the patient chooses. The patient is asked to keep the hope box nearby and use its contents when it seems hard to go on living.

But it is not always easy to keep such a hope box close at hand. A depressed Veteran or service member might find it inconvenient to take the hope box to work, for example, or might forget to bring it along on a trip. For this reason Nigel Bush and his colleagues at the National Center for Telehealth and Technology have designed a “virtual hope box,” a smartphone app that allows the patient to keep all those reasons for living close by at all times.

The entire app description is here.