Climate change, AI and ethical leadership in ‘big tech’, with Amazon principal UX design lead Maren Costa

“I just want to be proud of the company that I work for,” Maren Costa told me recently.

Costa is a Principal UX Design Lead at Amazon, for which she has worked since 2002. I was referred to her because of her leadership in the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice group I covered earlier this week for my series on the ethics of technology.

Like many of her peers at Amazon, Costa has been experiencing a tension between work she loves and a company culture and community she in many ways admires deeply, and what she sees as the company’s dangerous failings, or “blind spots,” regarding critical ethical issues such as climate change and AI.

Indeed, her concerns are increasingly typical of employees not only at Amazon, but throughout big tech and beyond, which seems worth noting particularly because hers is not the typical image many call to mind when thinking of giant tech companies.

A Gen-X poet and former Women’s Studies major, Costa drops casual references to neoliberal capitalism running amok into discussions of multiple topics. She has a self-deprecating sense of humor and worries about the impact of her work on women, people of color, and the Earth.

If such sentiments strike you as too idealistic to take seriously, it seems Glass Lewis and ISS, two of the world’s largest and most influential firms advising investors in such companies, would disagree. Both firms recently advised Amazon shareholders to vote in support of a resolution put forward by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and its supporters, calling on Amazon to dramatically change its approach to climate issues.

Glass Lewis’s statement urged Amazon to “provide reassurance” about its climate policies to employees like Ms. Costa, as “the Company’s apparent inaction on issues of climate change can present human capital risks, which have the potential to lead to the Company having problems attracting and retaining talented employees.” And in its similar report, ISS highlighted research reporting that 64 percent of millennials would be reluctant to work for a company “whose corporate social responsibility record does not align with their values.”

Amazon’s top leadership and shareholders ultimately voted down the measure, but the work of the Climate Justice Employees group continues unabated. And if you read the interview below, you might well join me in believing we’ll see many similar groups crop up at peer companies in the coming years, on a variety of issues. All of those groups will require many leaders — perhaps including you. After all, as Costa said, leadership comes from everywhere.”

Maren Costa: (Apologizes for coughing as interview was about to start)

Greg Epstein: … Well, you could say the Earth is choking too.

Costa: Segue.

Epstein: Exactly. Thank you so much for taking the time, Maren. You are something of an insider at your company.

Costa: Yeah, I took two years off, so I’ve actually worked here for 15 years but started 17 years ago. I actually came back to Amazon, which is surprising to me.

Epstein: You’ve really seen the company evolve.

Costa: Yes.

Epstein: And, in fact, you’ve helped it to evolve — I wouldn’t call myself a big Amazon customer, but based on your online portfolio, you’ve even worked on projects I personally have used. Though find it hard to believe anyone can find jeans that actually fit them on Amazon, I must say.

Costa: [My work is actually] on every page. You can’t use Amazon without using the global navigation, and that was my main project for years, in addition to a lot of the apparel and sort of the softer side of Amazon. Because when I started, it was very super male-dominated.

I mean, still is, but much more so. Jeff literally thought by putting a search box that you could type in Boolean queries was a great homepage, you know? He didn’t have any need for sort of pictures and colors.

(Photo: Lisa Werner/Moment Mobile/Getty Images)

Epstein: My previous interview [for this TechCrunch series on tech ethics] was with Jessica Powell, who used to be PR director of Google and has written a satirical novel about Google. One of the huge themes in her work is the culture at these companies that are heavily male-dominated and engineer-dominated, where maybe there are blind spots or things that the-

Costa: Totally.

Epstein: … kinds of people who’ve been good at founding these companies don’t tend to see. It sounds like that’s something you’ve been aware of and you’ve worked on over the years.

Costa: Absolutely, yes. It was actually a great opportunity, because it made my job pretty easy.

Epstein: One could even make the case that you, or people like you at least, are part of a success story of making companies like Amazon a little bit more inclusive, right? That maybe if they hadn’t had people like yourself to point out some of the deficiencies of a certain stereotypical kind of tech, maybe the company really wouldn’t have become this global behemoth that it’s become.

Costa: I think that’s true. I humbly submit that that would be true, and I wouldn’t be alone in that. You know, there’s obviously a ton of people in [Amazon’s inner circles], but the core needed help from people beyond themselves. They would not have been successful if they hadn’t increased the diversity of the people they were working with and listening to.

Epstein: This interview will focus on the climate justice work you’re doing now. But first, what other ethical issues have come up for you in your work at the company over the years?

Costa: A big one would be AI. I was recently working on both the Amazon Go store, where you don’t have to use cash or cards. You just walk in, take what you want, walk out. So it’s using computer vision, and the Alexa team.

I wanted to work in those groups, to get closer to artificial intelligence: who was making decisions about it? That’s a huge ethical issue we pretend isn’t happening, just like climate change. But to me, climate change is more urgent, so worrying about AI ethics became secondary to worrying about climate justice.

Epstein: I mean, the more AI gets attached to weaponry and the military industrial complex, the more it runs the risk of becoming just as urgent as climate change. But yes, your reasoning makes great sense to me.

Costa: They’re all connected … it’s the same mentality that connects them all.

Image via Getty Images / PayPau

Epstein: I want to ask a little about your personal story. You’ve spoken about this “neoliberal” society we’ve all lived under of late. And since you used the word “we,” I’ll share with you that I’ve been a chaplain for 15 years, and I’ve been interested in ethical issues all my adult life.

But I’m only relatively recently waking up to my ignorance about the ways our economy is set up to benefit people like me, at the expense of others. I wonder kind of journey you’ve had in terms of thinking about similar issues, over 2 decades at Amazon? How have you personally evolved in terms of the way that you see the ethical issues you’re working on?

Costa: In college, I was a women’s studies and English double major. I was writing feminist poetry on eco-feminism and reading books about the connection between hierarchical, patriarchal societies and oppression, and how all oppression is linked, whether it’s the oppression of the Earth or oppression of a certain race or religion or a culture. Just that mentality that seeks power over instead of power with, and that idea we can just continually take and take and take and never give back.

Then I found design, [which] I thought would be a more powerful vehicle for social change than poetry, because poetry was a little bit preaching to the choir, unfortunately. Design and technology seemed like a place to have a larger lever and a bigger impact. And then I had kids, and that kind of shut everything down for 10 years.

Now I’m coming out on the other side; I actually have bandwidth to think about something other than making sure I don’t walk out of the house looking half-dressed. So the years at Amazon were actually a little bit of a black hole in the way of my ethical and humanist or social pursuits, and now I’m coming back [to them].

Epstein: Thinking back to your earlier days at Amazon, what concerns might you have had back then about the ethical implications of a company like this? It would have been hard to imagine where things were going to go.

Costa: I know. And there was very much the idea in the early Amazon days that Amazon was actually on the positive side of climate change. We almost felt like just by existing we were doing the right thing. Because driving your individual car to the grocery store is so much more of a carbon impact than [delivery], or individual data centers versus cloud.

So we [thought], “Yay, we’re already intrinsically contributing to making the world a better place.” But that really is an outdated mindset, and it took us a while to realize that, like, “oh, no.”

Actually, the hyper-consumerism being supported by [not having] to drive your car to the store has now sort of run amok. It’s no longer something we can put in the plus column, because if every person gets every item singly delivered within two hours of when they want it, which is exactly where Amazon is heading now.

You just trace the ramp: it’s really nonlinear. It’s going exponentially up, where we have to have everything we want, and we have to have it now. And it goes along with, the world’s getting smaller, and now you have to get your produce from Mexico, you have to get whatever [from wherever]. We’re shipping products around the world without a thought of how that’s potentially contributing to our own demise.

The Image Bank / Getty Images Plus

Epstein: It would have been very hard to predict in 2002 or so that Amazon would one day have a web services company driving huge amounts of revenue by creating artificial intelligence to make oil extraction more efficient, but here we are.

Costa: Yes. And if the overarching sensibility is neoliberalism, extractivism, whatever you want to call it, then those things will happen. That’s why I’ve always felt tech is not inherently bad or good. It’s how we use it. But if we don’t have some sort of philosophy guiding us, we’ll always go out of control.

And the fear is that these things will start happening faster, because of the nonlinearity of tech. So there was X amount of time between the steam engine and the mobile phone, but there’s going to be a lot less time between the mobile phone and true artificial intelligence [that can] pass the Turing test. What are we going to do when we get there? We’re not prepared. We don’t have the foundation in place to ensure that we’ll make good decisions.

Epstein: Let me ask you about your comment about the consequences of not having some kind of philosophy in place. How do you decide whether the work you’re doing, in climate justice or elsewhere, is ethical? And how would you like for your peers and colleagues to think about that question?

Costa: In some ways, I’ve always known that climate justice is ethical. But then I have to say, “Well, how did I know that?” I suppose… just because the science and the data tells us that it is. Does that answer your question?

Epstein: It sounds like you’re thinking compassionately about our impact on human lives, and about using science and data to assess what the impacts on people’s lives are going to be.

Costa: Yeah, and using science and data to determine whether or not we are making the world a better place. You know, there’s always that sort of dream I think a lot of designers share–a lot of people in tech, [and] a lot of Millennials share that mentality. We quote-unquote “want to make the world a better place.” Well, now we can actually use data and science to find out the impact that we’re having on a global level.

Epstein: The Amazon Employees For Climate Justice group has already become pretty big. In my interview with your colleague Rajit Iftikhar, he pointed out that it’s not just, say, 1% of the employees of the company who’ve signed this thing. In the kinds of high-level design professions that you’re a part of, it sounds like it’s more like maybe 10% of employees who’ve signed.

Rajit Iftikhar

Costa: Yes, tech level. We figure there are about 60,000 to 65,000 corporate tech workers, so 8,000 signatures would be [over 10%]. And honestly, we didn’t even try that hard to get signatures. I mean, we tried, but we had no idea how many would come so fast. I think we’ve just begun to scratch the surface of the number of employees that will sign it.

Epstein: What kinds of things have you tried? I mean, there’s been an open letter. There’s been Emily Cunningham’s powerful speech at the shareholder’s meeting. You and a few colleagues have done some media, spoken out at rallies. What else have I not seen?

Costa: Internally, we sent out to several e-mail aliases, big groups of people, saying, “Hey, here’s this open letter. It’s really important. Would you be willing to add your signature?”

And we did an internal push before the shareholder meeting to some aliases, but I’m sure the vast majority of the company doesn’t even know we exist, especially when you get into the hundreds of thousands of non-corporate-type workers. The fulfillment centers, customer service, you know, the huge orgs that aren’t in Seattle, or even potentially in the United States.

Epstein: How do you balance the kind of speaking out that you are doing right at this moment with being an employee who has a kind of chain of command and responsibilities? What are the biggest tensions you’ve experienced with that?

Costa: For me, there’s no tension. It’s a release of tension for me. I have tension working here. I know many people who refuse to work here or have left, because working here creates tension in their life. They have to show up every day and put energy and effort and brain power and hours into supporting something they ethically can’t stand behind.

That’s taxing. That’s where you don’t feel good and you don’t feel like coming to work. This has been the opposite of that. There’s so much that I like about Amazon as a company, and so much I like about the leadership principles, the culture, and the work. I love being able to work here actually.

I just want to be proud of the company that I work for, and leadership comes from everywhere. And like you said earlier, blind spots. I think this was just a blind spot. Jeff has always said, he hires smart people and then lets them do their work.

He hired us because we’re smart, and if we see something he just hasn’t grokked the urgency of, and we take on that leadership to raise it up to the highest level and the volume that it needs to be at, that to me is being quote-unquote “Amazonian.” That is our DNA.

That’s [the positive] I have learned to do from working here all this time. You want to make change, you make it. I can hold up our leadership principles and hold up climate change, and bullet point for bullet point, there’s so much synergy. We’re just missing an opportunity.

Epstein: On a purely pragmatic level, and this may be even more coldly pragmatic than what you were getting at just now, there does seem to be some real job security for you and people like you. The minute that a company like Amazon with its public profile would start to force out outspoken people like yourself, they’d risk starting to hemorrhage a lot of their top talent, which is so valuable to them.

Costa: Yeah, and it’s getting harder and harder to hire. And that’s why ISS and Glass Lewis, two of the largest advisory firms that advise shareholders how to vote on shareholder resolutions, supported our resolution, [and] talked about recruiting and attrition being big potential issues if Amazon doesn’t become a climate leader and address the already large number of employees who are voicing their concerns.

Image via Getty Images / Shana Novak

Epstein: I’m thinking again of my conversation with Rajit Iftikhar, a software engineer at Amazon. Rajit is a young man, just a couple years out of college. I was so encouraged by his seemingly very generational ability to grasp these big issues at a young age that I don’t know that I grasped fully when I was his age. What’s it like for you to be working alongside younger activists at the company?

Costa: I think it’s fantastic. I mean, I’ve always worked among older and younger. I guess when I was in college, there weren’t too many younger than me, but then I moved out to Seattle and started a nonprofit, and we worked with tons of [younger activists] for years, even high school students. I love the passion that comes from youth. I think it’s getting more and more. They seem to be way smarter than I was when I was their age. It’s awesome.

Epstein: But it also does seem to be multi-generational. Rajit was very adamant that, while there are tons of people in his generation that are involved in this work, that by no means can it be reduced to that. And that people are working alongside one another from every background. I take it you share that impression.

Costa: Oh yeah. I mean, I’m 50. Don’t print that, but.

Epstein: There’s a place in this world for 50-year-olds and much, much beyond.

Costa: I’m not dead yet.

Epstein: I mean, and that’s really part of the ethics of technology, isn’t it? If we’re creating a technology industry that treats people at age 50 who are some of the most vibrant and able people I know as done in any way, it’s really impossible to say that we have ethical technology.

Costa: That would be a loss. Just like not including women or people of color never actually benefited the technology or the people that were keeping those people out…the same would happen with ageism.

Epstein: How optimistic are you about our shared human future?

Costa: Honestly, I’m not all that positive. I think we have a better chance of killing ourselves than learning how to make this work. I mean, I think there is actually a diagnosis for depression and anxiety brought on by climate change.

I think I have that, and I can’t understand how any kid couldn’t have that, and I have kids. I’m terrified for their future, and I don’t have a ton of hope. But what makes me feel hopeful and uplifted and able to go on is to collectively, collaboratively join forces with my fellow human beings who feel similarly and do everything that we reasonably can to make a difference.

Epstein: Thank you so much. Can’t ask for a better comment than that last part.