Locating Accountability and Centering the Margins for Ethical Technology Futures

Members of the organizing committee for the University of Waterloo’s “Ethical Tech for a Global Future” Symposium celebrate with keynote speaker Dr. Maurita T. Harris (clockwise from top left: Avri Jeffcott, Jacqueline Cardoso, Kayla J. Russell, Jin Sol Kim, Christopher Taylor, Shanté Francis Paddy, Fatima K. Suleiman, Heather A. Love, Maurita T. Harris; missing: Kujang Natana and Carter Neal)

Jin Sol Kim, Fatima K. Suleiman, Heather A. Love, Carter Neal and Christopher Stuart Taylor

Ethical failures of technological innovations are visible in high-stakes contexts and applications, but the decisions behind these ethical gaps, which are systematically produced upstream in the form of design assumptions, institutional constraints, and training practices, are often disconnected from the deployment of these innovations. This is apparent in real-world use cases such as the application of home-care technologies for individuals requiring ongoing care and support, where multiple tensions across healthcare, surveillance, and digital systems collide under conditions of continuous dependency and real-world constraint. Beyond misuse and unintended consequences, ethical failure arises in this context from assumptions and practices that ignore the requirements of real users and the social systems they operate within. These assumptions are typically embedded in design and institutional processes that isolate innovations from the social, economic, and historical context of those most in need of the technology. This special issue, emerging from the Ethical Tech for a Global Future (ETGF) Symposium at the University of Waterloo, examines how such failures are embedded across the lifecycle of technological innovations and explores the design, institutional, and educational conditions through which they can be addressed.

Held in October 2025, the inaugural student-led ETGF Symposium brought together interdisciplinary perspectives to examine the role of ethics, justice, and responsibility in shaping technological innovation [1]. The presentations and discussions at the symposium explored the real-world implications of technological change, engaging both the lived experiences of technology users and the social, political, and design landscapes that shape those experiences. The four papers presented in this issue are organized around this theme: they examine both how ethical failures become visible in real-world contexts and how these failures are shaped—and must therefore be addressed—through upstream design, training, and governance practices.

Crucially, the contributions in this issue position these ethical failures as features of technological design rather than as a product of unintended consequences, as real-world conditions and edge cases are often neglected from consideration in technologies’ design pipelines. The Special Issue begins with two articles that examine ethical failures in homecare technologies [A1], [A2] and ends with two others that locate ethics and responsibility in upstream training and design [A3], [A4]. This sequence was chosen with the intention to leave our readers with a call-to-action: to embrace approaches to technological innovation that center ethics—including a consideration of the margins—by design.

In the first article [A1], Noon examines ethical failures in home-care technologies by foregrounding the misalignment between design assumptions and the lived realities of care. Focusing on systemic barriers to the adoption of lifestyle monitoring devices among older adults, the commentary draws a clear distinction between the perceived and real affordability and accessibility of these innovations. Design assumptions often treat older adults as a homogeneous group, overlooking differences in socio-economic resources, digital literacy, available support systems, and technological trust, which are shaped by experiences of injustice across healthcare, surveillance, and other societal systems. By reframing ethical failure as a technology’s misalignment with lived realities, this article outlines concrete directions that account for the diversity of users and the socio-economic and institutional conditions that shape access, adoption, and sustained use integral to improving care.

The second article [A2] extends this analysis to the collective system of care, where responsibility is distributed across rotating caregivers, clinicians, and support networks. In response to the call to “center the margins” in the ETGF keynote by Dr. Maurita T. Harris (Wilfrid Laurier University), Tennant uses the example of three-ring binders in home-care settings to illustrate how existing practices of caregiver record-keeping meet critical requirements of shared access, continuity, and reliability, especially under constraints shaped by structural inequities. In contrast, many digital tools introduce friction to this practice without preserving the low-tech equivalent’s baseline functions, revealing a deeper issue: home-care technologies are often not designed for the realities under which care is delivered. Even when barriers to access and adoption are addressed, technological innovations can become new sources of burden rather than support, particularly within the complex system of collective care. To address this, Tennant introduces the “binder test” as a practical benchmark for evaluating whether innovation in home-care technologies meets the functional requirements already satisfied by existing low-tech systems. Such reframing challenges the assumption that innovation directly translates into improved care and redefines the key criterion for meaningful innovation as the ability to meet or exceed the functional baseline required under real-world constraints.

Where Bin Noon and Tennant’s articles urge us to consider users who are further marginalized by the design of homecare technologies, Cardoso and Lubin’s articles shift our attention to an examination of stakeholder responsibility by specifically focusing on the role of engineers in technological innovation. For Cardoso [A3], the lack of accountability and ethical failures surrounding large language models’ (LLMs) potential risks and harms stem, in part, from the perceived transfer of agency from human to machine “authors.” Cardoso argues that the view of AI models as independent persuasive agents who generate their own, “original” responses works to remove human accountability from LLMs’ chains of production. As machines do not have agency, however, this framing poses an ethical failure: it problematically displaces questions of human responsibility in addressing harmful LLM outputs. The proposed solution is to adopt a rhetorical lens: by treating engineers as rhetoricians, Cardoso asserts, we can begin the process of re-establishing human agency in the engineering pipeline. Doing so not only prompts individual engineers to reflect on their own role as producers of knowledge—as individuals who construct particular versions of reality—but it also invites the potential for a culture of collective accountability to flourish within engineering spaces.

Whereas artificial intelligence and technological innovation continue to be heralded as producing ground-breaking advancements in society, the question of whether they will break free from Western technology’s cultural hegemony remains to be seen.

Lubin [A4] takes a similar stance to responsible innovation but further specifies that the shift toward treating engineers as world-builders with a social responsibility for their products must begin within engineering education. She critiques that despite recognizing the ways that various AI systems absorb and extend existing hegemonies into their algorithmic operations, the current education system continues to promote a culture of boundless innovation that prioritizes technical excellence and functionality over critical awareness and design, as engineering students are taught to question “Does [a technology] work?” before being taught to ask, “Should it [even] exist?” In response to this ethical failure, Lubin proposes four principles for critical design pedagogy: 1) privileging question-posing over solutionism, starting with fundamental questions about the need for the technology; 2) cultivating rhetorical awareness in design to investigate the values and goals that the design prioritizes; 3) centering participatory and community-based design that acknowledges those severely impacted by the technology and how can they be included in its co-design; and 4) teaching genealogical analysis that identifies the existing systems of marginalization that the technology reproduces or challenges. Paired with concrete recommendations for pedagogical practice and institutional change, these principles offer some early steps for centering justice as a foundation of engineering education rather than treating it as an afterthought. In the context of the broader special issue, these four pedagogical calls to action invite readers to reflect back on the specific case studies that Cardoso, Tennant, and Bin Noon explore in their papers, each of which offers potential for educational value and critical reflection beyond its applied context.

In summary, while the four papers in this special issue were presented at a specific locale during the Ethical Tech for a Global Future Symposium in October 2025, their overarching themes provide a glimpse into some of the most pressing issues surrounding technological innovation, and especially around artificial intelligence, today. For those attuned to the social consequences of emerging technologies, these technologies’ disproportionate harms on marginalized groups and individuals and the need for a cultural shift toward engineering accountability will be undoubtedly familiar: they are nothing more than new, algorithmic manifestations of modernity’s institutional patterns. Whereas artificial intelligence and technological innovation continue to be heralded as producing ground-breaking advancements in society, the question of whether they will break free from Western technology’s cultural hegemony remains to be seen. Such an attempt at radical, institutional change must begin with centering real-world users at the margins and with locating accountability within our future engineers.

Appendix: Related Articles

Author Information

Jin Sol Kim is a postdoctoral fellow and an interdisciplinary scholar at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada, researching AI ethics, policy, and regulation in Canada, with a focus on facial recognition technologies.

Fatima K. Suleiman is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada.

Heather A. Love is an associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada, where she is with the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI), Critical Media Laboratory (CML), and Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI). Email: halove@uwaterloo.ca.

Carter Neal is an associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada.

Christopher Stuart Taylor serves as the associate vice-president in the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada, where he is also an associate professor of History and the Founder and the Scientific Director at the Pan-African Initiative for Research (PAIR).

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