Ethics of Products
Overview
This ethics lecture introduces classic insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to help future product managers think critically about the ethics and politics of technology. Drawing on Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” and Pinch & Bijker’s Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), the session explores how values, power, and moral assumptions become embedded in everyday products, especially agentic AI systems.
Contributors
- Ethics materials created by Wanheng Hu, with assistance from Louie Ortiz and Emily Lindsay Tianshi.
Ethics goals
- Understand how ethics and values are built into products and technical systems
- Recognize how design choices shape social consequences and power relations
- Identify the agency of product managers in shaping technology for good