Strategies for Designing Responsibly within a Capitalist Enterprise

2026-03-19

AI Summary

This study addresses the limited real-world adoption of responsible AI research in industry, which stems from a neglect of capitalist enterprises’ core imperative for value creation. Moving beyond the conventional dichotomy between ethics and commerce, this work proposes an integrative conceptual framework that aligns ethical and business objectives. By synthesizing human-computer interaction methodologies with responsible AI principles, the approach generates design solutions that are simultaneously ethically compliant and commercially viable. This synergy expands the actionable design space for responsible AI and offers a concrete pathway for translating academic insights into corporate practice, thereby significantly enhancing the real-world impact of responsible AI initiatives.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Morality & Value-based AI
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Machine Learning: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

Despite significant advances in responsible AI research, industry adoption remains limited, leaving many HCI contributions underutilized in practice. This position paper argues that current research often fails to account for the fundamental need for capitalist enterprises to create value. To achieve immediate real-world impact, responsible AI research must explore how to design responsibly within capitalism. We call for a move beyond the dichotomy of "ethics vs. business" toward a more productive framing of "ethics and business." We propose ideation as a practical design strategy for generating ethically preferable alternatives that also meet business objectives. By aligning ethics with enterprise realities, we expand the space of responsible design that can actually be built.

Problem

• responsible AI
• capitalist enterprise
• industry adoption
• ethics and business
• HCI

Innovation

• Responsible AI
• ideation
• ethics and business
• capitalist enterprise
• design strategy