Build a better tech future. Give today.
This Giving Tuesday, join us in shaping technology that protects people and society.
Safe, fair, ethical tech. Together, we can make it happen
Responsible technology begins with builders. And your support will directly equip tech and AI builders with the tools to embed ethics, privacy, and safety into the products of tomorrow.
The professionals in our ETP Fellows Program are transforming the tech innovation ecosystem. So instead of us describing ETP’s impact - we’re letting our Fellows speak for themselves about how powerful our program is.
Steven Chu walks us through one of our flagship activities, and how he’s making his own code of ethics.
Joshua Evans shares what he loves about the ETP community, and gives his advice for future Fellows.
And Kiran Suryadevara makes the case for why ethical tech is so crucial now.
Every person we train, every builder we equip, and every standard we scale reaches millions through the products they create and the teams they influence.
And that’s all made possible with your support.
With gratitude,
Jennie & Nancy
Here’s what we’ve been reading and listening to, and you should be too:
🙈 Privacy
The New York Times: A.I. Is Deciding Who You Are
In the age of A.I., personal data is anything but personal.
Christina E. Volcy: Ring doorbell footage shared with ICE, Secret Service, Navy
Your Ring doorbell just became part of ICE’s surveillance network.
🗳️ Democracy
TechPolicy.Press: Amazon Cloud Outage Reveals Democratic Deficit in Relying on Big Tech. The AWS outage was not just a technical failure. It was a democratic one.
🤖 Advances in Tech
The New Yorker: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
ChatGPT does not have an inner life. Yet it seems to know what it’s talking about.
🗞️ News and Information
Nathalie Malinarich: Our new research into the accuracy of the most popular AI assistants shows that while there has been improvement there are still significant issues with how they represent news content. Following research released in February, the BBC partnered with the EBU and its members to extend this to other countries and languages. 22 public service media organisations (in 18 countries and 14 languages) took part.
The Guardian: What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’. As GenAI becomes the primary way to find information, local and traditional wisdom is being lost. And we are only beginning to realise what we’re missing.
💸 Money
The New Yorker: Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid. A data center, which can use as much electricity as Philadelphia, is the new American factory, creating the future and propping up the economy. How long can this last?
The New York Times: The A.I. Boom Is Driving the Economy. What Happens if It Falters? A windfall for companies that build data centers and their suppliers is overshadowing weakness in other industries.
🦺 Labor and Jobs
Notes from the Circus: The Coming Clash of Civilizations. From the Wilderness of a Recovering Technocrat
The Distributed Research Institute (DAIR): DRIVEN DOWN: How Workplace Technology Enables Amazon to Steal Wages, Hide Labor, Intensify Poor Working Conditions, and Evade Responsibility. Based on in-depth interviews and direct organizing experience, “Drive Down” reveals how Amazon is using surveillance technologies to intensify driver workloads, instill a patchwork of uneven digital punishments and expose all drivers to potential wage theft and unsafe working conditions.
🧠 Mental Health
The New York Times: I Led Product Safety at OpenAI. Don’t Trust Its Claims About ‘Erotica.’ A.I. companies need to do more to show the proof behind their claims.
📃 Policy and Regulation
TIME: AI Regulation is Not Enough. We Need AI Morals “The challenge of our time is to keep moral intelligence in step with machine intelligence.”
The New York Times: Who Pays When A.I. Is Wrong? New court cases seek to define content created by artificial intelligence as defamatory — a novel concept that has captivated some legal experts.
Luiza’s Newsletter: “I expect some really bad stuff to happen”. OpenAI’s legal department is probably fuming over Sam Altman’s recent statements |
🌎 Environmental Impact
The Guardian: Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document shows. Executives at world’s biggest datacenter owner grappled with disclosing information about water used to help power facilities
🎓 Research and Resources
Neal K. Shah: A Dutch laboratory just proved what many of us feared: the rot is in the architecture. Researchers built a social platform stripped to bare essentials - 500 AI agents, no algorithms, no surveillance apparatus. Just the fundamental mechanics: post, follow, amplify. The bots fractured into warring tribes within hours. A narrow elite captured all attention. Extremism flourished.
Longview: The Last Invention. The AI revolution has begun – the product of a seventy-year quest by scientists, mathematicians, and visionaries who set out to build machines that could think. But what began as a fringe idea has now become one of the most powerful forces of the 21st century.