Ethics Newsline®

Gremlin Ethics

Sep 15th, 2008 • Posted in: Commentary

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Over the weekend my assistant emailed me to say she’d just spoken with a client. “He will be in a meeting from 4 to 5 P.M. today,” she wrote me, “but asked if you could call him on his cell phone, and he’ll step out of the meeting to talk.”

Good client, pressing message — so you reach for the phone, right? Except that it seemed a little odd. He and I had worked closely together last spring, but we hadn’t been in touch for several months. So why the urgency? Yet my assistant is a trusted source. So why doubt her message’s veracity?

As her email arrived, I was sitting down to write this column about the week’s major e-mess: the Google-facilitated debacle that caused United Airlines stock to shed more than $1 billion in market value in 12 minutes on September 8. The mess arose when a six-year-old news story about United’s pending bankruptcy mysteriously resurfaced — and was mistakenly republished as current news. Maybe that’s why, instead of picking up the phone, I checked the date on my assistant’s email: March 20, 2008. That’s when I remembered I’d seen it before.

Who knows how, in the netherworld inside our computer servers, the gremlins conspire to disguise six-month-old emails as new messages? Had I made the call, my friend would have been perplexed and I embarrassed. But at least nobody would have been out a billion dollars. And that’s the point: The gremlins we tolerate on the personal level become intolerable in the global arena.

In United’s case, the chain of events is clear — up to a point. On Sunday, September 7, a Google Web crawler, automatically trolling for interesting stories, found the notice of United’s bankruptcy in 2002 on a current Web page of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. The crawler made the story accessible to an employee at Income Securities Advisors, a Florida investment advisory firm, who then posted the headline electronically on his company’s wire service.

That posting made the story available to the trading terminals at Bloomberg News, the widely followed financial news and data company. That exposure in turn triggered automatic sell orders by computers programmed to and react to breaking news within seconds. That selling trend was noticed by other computers, and the race for the bottom began. It ended only when United spotted the sell-off and refuted the rumor.

Could this juggernaut have been stopped? Google and the Tribune Company, whose Chicago Tribune published the 2002 United story and which owns the Sun-Sentinel, have been trading blame and doing further investigations. And what about the employee at the advisory service? Had he read further into the story, he would have recognized it as old news. But he didn’t read further since time was of the essence: The faster his clients (or their computers) got the news, the quicker they could react. Even if he hadn’t posted it, someone else might have.

What remains unclear — and oddly undiscussed — is how the story ever got from a six-year-old archive to the day’s current news. Was it the same gremlin that sent my six-month-old email, or did a human put it there? If it was the former, this is a story about our inability to exercise ethical and responsible control over the technologies we invent — and perhaps our unwillingness to do so, lest we impede the headlong pace of life in the financial world. All that was needed was the intervention of human judgment. But judgment slows you down — even if only for a minute or two, as editors confer in a newsroom about a story, a headline, or a placement. Yet judgment is why readers still turn to news organizations, rather than just mucking about on the Web for themselves. What does it tell us if, at a news organization as sophisticated as the Tribune Company, no human backstop was in place to keep old stories off new pages?

And what does it tell us if they did have a backstop? Could an unethical individual, holding such a position at some newspaper, conspire to launch such a story — a person, say, who loves to create havoc? A computer geek proving he can manipulate the world? A disgruntled former employee getting back at some company by targeting its stock? A savvy investor who buys when the shares hit bottom and sells when they regain their value? A terrorist seeking to wreck a market and bring down a nation?

In a world where computers now read our papers, assess our probabilities, and trigger our sales and purchases, the moral control of technology has never been more important. It’s long been true that technology leverages our ethics, megaphoning minor turpitudes into major calamities. It’s now clear that gremlins can create as much calamity as humans. And since we can’t teach ethics to gremlins, our only choice is to root out the gremlins with the same moral determination we bring to cracking down on hackers or disabling terrorists. We can’t afford to dismiss the cause of the United stock blip as just another glitch. When technology is this important in our lives, being pretty good isn’t enough. Either we control our technology, or it controls us.