THREE LESSONS FROM THE HOLOCAUST FOR YOUNG TECHNOLOGISTS
We are three researchers in various fields of technology who had the privilege of participating in a two-week-long fellowship in Europe on the topic of professional ethics. This FASPE (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics) fellowship exposed us to the history of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrators (especially the professional class of doctors, lawyers, and scientists) and asked us to reflect on ethics in our fields today.
Spencer Doyle, Leah Kaplan, Emma Pan
From large language models to quantum computers, genome editing, autonomous vehicles, and virtual reality, we live in a time characterized by many and diverse innovations. While there exists potential for positive social outcomes, with complexity comes unpredictability. The unintended consequences stemming from our innovations may leave us wishing we had never invented such new technology in the first place.
History is filled with lessons for those willing to listen. By reckoning with the role of scientists and engineers in enabling the ultimate tragedy of our time at these historical sites, we heard more than just lessons: a heartrending wail echoed through the camps, towns, and ruins. Although we will be reflecting on these cries for a lifetime, we feel the responsibility to share a condensed version of our collective experience in the form of in-progress lessons for modern technologists.
Lesson 1: Don’t let the title “technologist” fool you—our jobs are just as social as they are technical.
As we design new hardware and software, so too we design new ways for people to interact with each other both digitally and physically. By way of social connections in the workplace, even the professional norms that we develop as we work through R&D impose themselves on future researchers and projects.
When studying the Holocaust, the inescapable connection between the technological and the social is visible in essentially every case study. One, however, stands out: the company responsible for enabling the large-scale burning of bodies at concentration camps.
As cremation gained popularity in the early twentieth century, Topf and Sons depicted the development of crematoria as a means of bringing “dignity to death.”1 When tasked by the Nazi regime in 1939 with providing ovens for their camps, the company went above and beyond. They offered redesigned crematoria capable of much more efficient operation, going so far as to provide unsolicited advice on how to improve the venting of the gas chambers to speed up the killing process.
This was the corporate culture of Topf and Sons, emphasizing innovation and technological perfection above all else. In a 1938 letter from the Topf Brothers to their employees (a year before the company would begin testing and installing crematoria in concentration camps), they highlighted this operating principle: “this corporation always puts invention, creativity and proficiency before capital.”2 Indeed, this sentiment is clear from their collaboration with the SS: such contracts never accounted for more than a small percentage of the company’s turnover.3
The engineers were in it for the opportunity to innovate, taking on what philosopher Zygmunt Bauman describes as a technical, rather than a moral, responsibility.4
Bringing our moment back into focus: how different are we as engineers and technologists today?
Pessimistically, the so-called Silicon Valley model of innovation5 has encouraged an operating principle well summarized by one of its most successful proponents and benefactors, Mark Zuckerberg: “Move fast and break things.” Such a motto mirrors the rationale of companies like Topf and Sons in their choice to help realize the Nazi regime’s “Final Solution”: committing genocide against Jewish people.
Optimistically, we can learn from our recent history and reflect on further industrial and digital developments. With this in mind, we can see that moral and technological responsibilities are not interchangeable. If you find yourself working insistently on technical problems without considering social or ethical considerations, reflect on why this might be. Does it benefit your employer? Is it easier for you?
By understanding where this separation of responsibilities comes from, we can better modify our practices and institutions to move towards more socially cognizant innovation.
Lesson 2: Scale deliberately and iteratively to minimize harm.
Technologists often assert that a key contribution of their profession is improving scale and efficiency. The subtle implication is, of course, that scale and efficiency are inherently positive goals. At minimum, these do seem intimately tied to examples of modern technological achievement, such as
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