While my colleagues and I do not gather to plan mass genocides, the experience of coming to a beautiful location to meet with colleagues and friends to discuss “difficult problems” hit close to home. In my own research, I receive grants from the US Department of Defense to develop technologies that can enhance human-autonomy teaming, an area of research that could have far-reaching military applications. While the participants at Wannsee were certainly well aware of the implications of what they were planning, many were convinced that they were working towards a public good. I wondered what it would take for me to convince myself that I am solving important problems in the name of advancing science or contributing to the common good, while I am actually enhancing our ability to target marginalized groups more efficiently and effectively. Perhaps I already am. This issue vexes me now, and I will continue to grapple with it throughout my career.
Inside the House of the Wannsee Conference, we viewed documents from the meeting. One document that captured my attention was an invitation to attend the conference. It reminded me of the invitation I received to attend the seminar at Dagstuhl. I thought about the emotions I felt after receiving that invitation. I felt like my work, which I often feel uncertain about, had been validated. I could rest assured that my professional community recognized my work as important and meaningful. My insecurities were temporarily assuaged, and I could feel gratified that I was making progress towards my ambitions.
While the participants at Wannsee were already top Nazi officials, I wondered how they responded to receiving their invitations to participate in the conference. Did they feel reassured that they were doing noble work? Did they feel validated in the positions they held? Did they feel honored to participate in something so important? I wondered to what extent the participants’ professional ambitions and insecurities hardened them to the consequences of their actions. To what extent do my own ambitions and insecurities dictate the direction of my work? Could they blind me to my own accountability with respect to societal harms? I came away from our visit to Wannsee with a renewed sense of the importance of reflecting on such questions, including what drives my own decision-making from day to day. I began to ask whether my motivations and decisions were aligned with my values and how I could approach decision-making with more intentionality.
Questions that technologists can reflect on in considering our accountability within our professional roles include:
• What decisions did I make today?
• Which motivations guided my decision-making process?
• Did these decisions align with my values?
• What will I do the same or differently in the future?
Identifying Collective Power
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
Ezekiel 37:9-10
The third theme that emerged during the site visits and discussions throughout the FASPE trip was related to the power of collective action, both for good and ill. With each site we visited, it was clear that no one person alone could have executed the Holocaust. It took the participation and cooperation of tens of thousands, with some estimates suggesting up to 200,000 perpetrators total28. Partially, the Nazis managed to foster such widespread participation through the division of tasks and the minimization of information sharing between those performing different jobs29. Each person inhabited a relatively narrow role, had minimal knowledge about what others were doing, and knew very little about the overall system. Although the German people most likely had some awareness of what was happening to Jews and other marginalized people during the Third Reich, information only officially flowed on a need-to-know basis, such that few individuals saw the whole picture.
This structure of work made it easier for each person to reduce their sense of moral culpability. For example, at Auschwitz the train operators could say that they were only transporting people from one location to the next. The doctors could say that they were only selecting those who were fit for work. The guards could say that they were simply keeping order within the camps. The operators of the gas chambers could say that they were only mechanistically undertaking their orders. This distribution not only reduced each individual’s sense of responsibility and accountability but it also disempowered any one person from having enough agency to effectively fight the system. Even if one person had the courage to stand up, there were plenty of additional people available to take their place. Beyond this fact, professional ambitions or fear of the repressive government likely kept many from speaking out.
However, during various FASPE site visits, we learned about many examples in which professional non-participation did not result in violent retribution or death but rather in reassignment to new roles or new tasks. For example, at the Brandenburg Euthanasia Center, we learned that doctors who refused to participate in the euthanasia program were most often simply assigned to practice elsewhere. While individual doctors who chose to refuse to cooperate with the T4 program could not have had sweeping effects on the efficacy of this Nazi program on their own, if many or all doctors refused to participate, this shift could have amounted to a substantial slowing of the process. The challenge for doctors in that context would have been identifying potential allies in resistance and determining concrete steps that they could have taken to be most effective.
29
20