Social work’s values will be vital to make the rise of the machines ethical

Professor Amanda Taylor-Beswick on what the fourth industrial revolution and rapid advances in AI mean for the profession. Those who have kept pace with the pioneering work of a group of social workers, collectively known as husITa, will be aware that technological advances do not always align with human values and human ethics. husITa exists to ensure that advances in technology work for the benefit of humanity, rather than against it. Social work, as a profession, however, has still not fully grasped the tensions and the threats of innovation. For example, the problems with using ‘free’ platforms and applications in professional practice, and the potential this creates for ‘double disadvantage’ - a phrase to describe the cost of using platforms that mine and repurpose peoples’ data, including those who are already vulnerable to surveillance, welfare sanctions, and punitive processes. The instinct to develop technological solutions for human problems remains central to our evolution and has been evident from the pre-industrial era to the current fourth industrial revolution, which is witnessing high-powered automation and human-machine integration. Once fictional concepts are becoming tangible realities. For example George Orwell predicted current issues such as Big Brother surveillance, misinformation, loss of privacy, and social control 80 years ago in his dystopian masterpiece 1984.