The only way is ethics: why the geeks are gifting academic institutions

Today's PassW0rd radio show on ResonanceFM (104.4 fm in London, on DAB and online at www.resonancefm.com) looks at the sudden swing towards ethical business and the moves by many of those in the tech community to distance themselves from tech harms.

In the broadcast at 17.30pm today we interview some of the signatories of the Copenhagen tech pledge about why they are suffering a crisis of conscience about the information age. Leading lights of the digital revolution such as Chris Messina, the developer of the 'hastag concept' for Twitter and Aza Raskin, one of the technology heavyweights for Mozilla and now the co-founder of the Center for Human Technology tell us why they want to put the brakes on a system that is out of control.

For Messina it is quite simply to do with the pace at which technology has taken over our lives and now rather than augmenting them is actually dictating to us, he says that the problem is possibly our economic systems.

"The Hashtag was created in 2007, so it's been 12 years since that point and we have gone through such a rapid technological change and we have scaled up so quickly because the industrial revolution gave us the ability to scale and propagate changes throughout society very quickly.

"So now we are having to confront an enormous amount of change, across an enormous number of people, across an enormous geographic space in a way that we have never had to deal with before. So we've made ourselves really, really powerful but we didn't stop to think how this could possibly go wrong.

"So I'm trying to think what was it about the culture in 2007 that was either undeveloped or immature or may have led to those things and if we had listened better, had been more empathetic and had maybe slowed down a little - even Biz and Ed from Twitter have said that when they developed it that they were not thinking about the potential for abuse. For me now it's about a new Hashtag and that hashtag is better humans."

In Silicon Valley, Messina says the geeks are suffering from existential angst and there are signs that is spreading. In New York just recently it was announced by some of the US's top 200 companies that they had decided that profit was not the be-all and end-all of the corporate mission. In an announcement from the US Business Round Table to which the companies all belonged they stated that now concern for the environment, their place of business and their employees were just as important for them.

In the UK the Financial Times, that Bible of Mammon, was recently sold in a wrapper asking the question: "was capitalism dead?"

And as we will hear in the programme, Lord Clement-Jones head of the House of Lords' AI Select Committee says that there is a need to develop a different model of capitalism.

All perhaps not enough of a reason for the sudden explosion of ethical consideration that has seen both Google and Facebook start to announce funding for various different university courses across Europe.

Some have cynically suggested that the reason for the recent bequests to German universities are simply due to the German Netz DG legislation which can levy fines of €2 m on companies that do not take down hate speech comments within 24 hours, but perhaps its not that as Professor Christoph Luetge told us it's probably much more likely that people need to trust technology whether it is automated cars or social media.

If they do not trust it they will not use and that will radically damage the economic model of the internet companies.