Strategies for Designing Responsibly within a Capitalist Enterprise
This addresses the gap between responsible AI research and practical implementation in enterprises, though it is incremental by reframing rather than introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the limited adoption of responsible AI in industry by arguing that research must align with capitalist value creation, proposing ideation as a strategy to generate ethical alternatives that meet business objectives, thereby expanding feasible responsible design.
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.