The Ethical Technology Initiative
Building a multidisciplinary approach to technology grounded in ethics, public responsibility, and human values.
The Ethical Technology Initiative at California Polytechnic State University brought together researchers, students, industry leaders, policymakers, and civil society organizations to examine the ethical, political, and societal implications of emerging technologies. Founded in 2019, the Initiative created an institutional home for interdisciplinary research, education, and public engagement at the intersection of technology, democracy, and public life.
Why the Initiative Was Created
The technologies reshaping society do not raise purely technical questions. They reshape democratic institutions, labor, education, privacy, public discourse, and human relationships. Yet these questions are often addressed separately by engineers, ethicists, policymakers, and social scientists.
The Ethical Technology Initiative was created to bring those conversations back together.
Rather than treating ethics as an external constraint on technological innovation, the Initiative explored how ethical reasoning could become part of technological design itself. Through research, teaching, public programming, and interdisciplinary collaboration, we worked to develop new ways of understanding the relationship between technological innovation and the public good.
Our Work
Research
The Initiative supported interdisciplinary research examining artificial intelligence, algorithmic accountability, public interest technology, responsible innovation, digital ethics, and emerging technology governance.
Education
The Initiative developed new courses, student research opportunities, workshops, and public lectures introducing students to the ethical and societal dimensions of emerging technologies.
Public Engagement
The Initiative hosted public events and conversations connecting researchers, technologists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and community organizations around the future of technology and society.
Technically Human
The Initiative also launched “Technically Human,” a podcast exploring the relationship between technology and what it means to be human through conversations with researchers, founders, policymakers, writers, and public intellectuals.
Major Research Projects
The Future of Work: The Emerging Profession of Ethical Technology
National Science Foundation (NSF)
An empirical study examining the emergence of the responsible technology workforce and the changing institutional role of ethics within technology organizations.
Read more about the project here.
Revolutionizing the Tech Workforce, Cal Poly Strategic Research Initiative
Research examining how interdisciplinary approaches can reshape technological education and professional practice.
Read more about these projects here.
Legacy
When I transitioned to the University of California, Berkeley, I took the questions that I first explored through this work with me. They continue to shape my research today, and Cal Poly continues to be a pioneer in thinking about the intersection of ethics and tech.
The Initiative laid the foundation for my subsequent research on AI governance, institutional design, the responsible technology workforce, and my forthcoming MIT Press book, The Technological Grotesque. Many of the ideas that began here have evolved into a broader research program examining how societies govern increasingly powerful technological systems while preserving democratic accountability and human judgment.
Ethical , Responsible, and Public Interest Technology is an emerging field of inquiry and profession that seeks to develop an approach to technological innovation grounded in humanistic principles in values. It foregrounds tech ideation, practices, cultures, and products that are equitable in both process and outcome.
The Ethical Tech Initiative @ Cal Poly brings faculty together across areas of expertise to develop a framework for thinking about how we build technologies that make the world a better place—and what we envision as a better world. We create classes, we build partnerships, and we design programs that help train the next generation of the tech workforce to think ethically, equitably, and responsibly about what and how they will build a technological future. We work with scholars inside the academy, thought leaders, public interest technologists, and industry leaders to imagine technology in new ways, and we bring stakeholders together across divides to solve the major problems we face at the intersection of ethics, policy, and technological production.
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