According to LinkedIn the mission of LinkedIn and why we should participate on its platform is simple: “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” The LinkedIn vision for how productivity and success is measured is simple as well: “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” – https://about.linkedin.com. It is a narrower focused mission compared to the Facebook’s “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” – https://about.facebook.com. Facebook, and other platforms with similar mission statements, have hence become sounding boards where contrasting social and political points of view are discussed and debated, sometimes in a productive light, but too often acrimoniously. As such, many of us on the LinkedIn platform believe we should “stay in our lanes”, remain focus on the business of business. I counted myself among them. But is that the end of the discussion? Can our conduct on this platform remain restrained to travel lanes and guardrails so simplistically? Perhaps not.

Perhaps we should consider second degree effects of our business’ successes. Take GPS technology for example, just one of the many innovations my field of business brought to fruition in the last 20 years. We promoted it worldwide and improved its position accuracy to just a mere few feet of uncertainty. Now from the palm of my hand I can be conveniently directed to the exact isle and shelf in a mammoth store to find the specific product of my liking ….. or …. the same technology accurately guides a Russian cruise missile to explode in the center of a Ukrainian school yard. Want another example? Rapidly evolving solutions using artificial intelligence and augmented reality offer potential new methods of medical diagnosis and actual treatment. The Meta corporation, owner of Facebook is even making augmented reality the center piece of their future platform. The same core technology however is used by the Russian disinformation apparatus to create deep fakes of Zelensky surrendering to Putin. So, can we really differentiate our responsibility into separate lanes of how products of our business are used one instance from other applications of the same? Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer would say not.

In their day, Einstein and Oppenheimer recognized that even theoretical physics cannot remain isolated in ivy towers of academia. Einstein twice stepped over the lane, the first time to warn then President Roosevelt that Hitler and the Nazis were developing an atomic weapon, a weapon they would have most certainly used, and a second time, joined by Oppenheimer, to warn us all that such weaponry would lead to our doom unless constrained. Their actions were out of their lanes of expertise and were not initially welcomed with open minds. These men, whose minds understood that disparate concepts time and space are indeed connected, also saw mathematical connection between technical innovation and the resulting human condition. So shouldn’t their example be an guidepost for our behavior when confronted with global changing events in our modern world, even when it requires stepping over the lane lines?

I recognize potential pretentiousness of the previous paragraph. Even if we agree stepping over the lane line is the right thing to do, I, and most of us, cannot aspire to equate ourselves with the notoriety of Einstein. No matter how proficient and effective we are in our fields we are still just small cogs in a very big machine. We do not have the influencer leverage of millions of followers. Very few of us will become Tic Tok megastars. So without that kind of following you ask, why voice ethical opinions if it would only serve to annoy a few of your associates? The answer is in fabric of LinkedIn itself, the three degrees of connection, or practically put, the three degrees of influence. It can be quantitatively observed that, as individuals in a social network, we have measurable influence on indirect contacts beyond people we directly know and in a surprisingly far-flung way. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_degrees_of_influence)

In my own network I have only a handful of Russian contacts and none residing in Ukraine. However, in my second level of contacts I can count the numbers for both countries in the hundreds. By the third level the number of contacts is in the millions for each country. So, depending on how the LinkedIn algorithms promote posts and shares content, yes, these words will be read by some of those people. Probably not many at first but perhaps if these words resonate with the first few people who engaged, the algorithm will pass the message on to others.

But what then? What are the calls to action? Maybe a conversation and recognition that success in economic opportunity also requires ethical foundation. That our technology and products have ethical consequences.