IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 68

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identification of criminals or curtailing hate speech.
Lessig's point was that some engineering choices
that seem purely technological in nature can actually
be understood as having a socio/political regulatory
effect. Because all technological architectures
necessarily inhibit some activities and promote others,
engineering design can be seen as regulating
social behavior implicitly in a manner that is analogous
to the explicit government regulation that
occurs through law.
More recently, scholars from the algorithmic " fairness,
accountability, and transparency (FAT) " literature
have revisited these concepts in the context of
artificial intelligence and algorithmic governance.
For example, Barocas and Selbst [2] have discussed
the subtle racial or ethnic biases that can arise in
algorithmic decision making. Citron [6] and Kroll et
al. [14] (separately) observed the lack of accountability
in computer-based decision making that
increasingly occurs in government context. Kleinberg
et al. [10] identified the fairness and allocation
tradeoffs that must inevitably occur in the design of
all algorithmic systems.
Overall, Lessig [12], Winner [28], and other scholars
raised some fundamental points about technological
design and values. First, they illustrated that
technological choices made by engineers can have
substantive real-world effects upon people's lives,
legal rights, and abilities that rival, or even exceed,
the impact of overt law and policy choices made
by governments. Another, perhaps more important
contribution was to challenge a common belief that
technological systems, and their design, are somehow
neutral with respect to social, political, and
other values.
Intentional and unintentional embedding of
values
Although technological systems are not value-neutral,
it is useful to distinguish between unintentional
and intentional embedding of values.
This is because the embodiment of values within
technology does not necessarily arise due to deliberate
manipulation.
To intentionally embed a value is to purposely
design a technology to promote one or more values
or interests. A good example is " privacy by design. "
This is the view that information systems should be
consciously engineered from the outset with features
or processes that promote privacy [22]. For
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example, a library information system could be
purposefully designed to immediately delete data
about user borrowing history, rather than storing it
persistently [22]. Such a technological design would
have the effect of promoting privacy because many
privacy violations involve the later acquisition of
stored user data records. Although privacy by design
is generally thought of as a positive example of purposely
structured values, other examples of deliberately
embedding values are not so benign. Winner's
[28] highway scenario exemplifies how values can
be intentionally embedded in technology to harm
certain members of society and promote the interests
of others.
Perhaps more common, and more pressing
however, is the unintentional embedding of values.
This occurs when certain technological designs are
chosen over others for functionality, engineering,
efficiency, usability, business, or other legitimate,
practical reasons. Unintentional embedding of values
occurs when a technology ends up, in practice,
advantaging certain values (or social groups) over
others as an unforeseen or unwanted byproduct of
a chosen design.
For example, consider a system used to approve
or deny government benefits (e.g., unemployment
benefits). Imagine that
to reduce development
expenses, the engineers designed the system without
an audit trail (i.e., a database that records every
action and that can later be used to reconstruct a
decision-making process) [6]. While superficially
this was a value-neutral engineering decision made
for budgetary reasons, such a design can also be
understood as unintentionally prioritizing some values
over others. The lack of an audit trail may end
up promoting the finality of decisions of government
officials at the expense of other values, such
as appealability for applicants, because the absence
of retrievable process record will make it harder for
applicants to contest unfavorable benefits decisions
[6]. This illustrates how a design decision made for
legitimate development purposes can, as a byproduct,
unintentionally but significantly promote certain
societal values over others when the technology
is broadly used.
Such unintentional embedding of values is of
greater concern for several reasons. First, it is likely
much more common than intentional embedding,
as embedded values frequently arise only as an
unintended side effect of legitimate product design
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

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