97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know

Chapter 17. First, Do No Harm

Eric Schmidt

Global Director, Data & Analytics, Coca-Cola

It is October 2019, and I am presenting at a data science conference at the Historic Academy of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. Unceremoniously tucked away in a corner of the men’s room is a bust of Hippocrates, the father of professional ethics, and a plaque with the Hippocratic oath. The basic gist of the Hippocratic oath is primum non nocere, or “first, do no harm.” That is a pretty good generalization and represents an ethical framework that has stood for millennia. As a new profession, data science is just beginning to define our ethical framework.

As I stared at Hippocrates’s bust, I wanted to ask him: who defines ethics? Leaders of technology companies have been at the center of the public stage in this discussion, but I wonder if they are leveraging the wealth of established philosophy on ethics. Rather than inventing new frameworks, what could Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Jack Ma learn about data privacy or other modern ethical dilemmas from Socrates, Confucius, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Nietzsche? For example, Hobbes and Locke might argue over social contract theory to sway Zuckerberg toward more or less absolute government regulation. If we leave data science ethics to the technocrats and allow corporations to follow ...