This is the claim to be able to answer. It is not simply wrong — a tool really can be used well or badly — but it hides every decision made before anybody used anything.
Three design decisions, each carrying a value, producing behaviour that nobody chose.
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Who is in the room
Decides which problems are visible at all. A team that has never been followed does not think about location data.
What the default is
Almost nobody changes a default, so the default is the decision — for nearly everyone.
What is measured
What is measured improves; what is not measured cannot influence anything the team does next.
The strongest single sentence: Unmeasured harm cannot change a product, because nothing reports it. That is not indifference — it is a value written into what the team decided to count.
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Real-world examples you can name
YouTube's recommendation system — deep-learning system described 2016; borderline-content changes from January 2019
A ranking system that predicts what a viewer will watch next, which the company has said drives the majority of watch time. After criticism that it led viewers towards ever more extreme material, the company began demoting 'borderline' content rather than removing it.
Who it affected: Roughly two billion monthly viewers, and creators whose income depends on the ranking.
Amazon's scrapped CV-screening tool — reported October 2018
An experimental hiring tool was trained on a decade of CVs submitted to the company, most of them from men. It learned to downgrade CVs containing the word 'women's' and graduates of two women's colleges. The project was abandoned.
Who it affected: Women applying for technical roles, and every organization that assumed historical data was neutral.
Precision agriculture and the right to repair — memorandum of understanding with US farmers January 2023
Tractors guided by GPS apply seed and spray field by field, cutting inputs. Because the software is locked, farmers could not repair their own machines; after years of pressure the manufacturer agreed to make tools and manuals available.
Who it affected: Farmers whose harvest window does not wait for an authorized technician.
Values built in on purpose: It runs the other way too. Privacy by default, accessibility requirements and the right to repair are all values deliberately built into a design.
The claim is not that design is sinister — it is that design is never empty.
How this is tested — this claim appears in sources constantly, and answering it well is a reliable route into the top band. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — structured question
- Part c: evaluate the claim that a technology is neutral
- Part b: explain how a design choice carries a value
Paper 2 — source-based question
- Q2: explain a source's claim about responsibility
- HL Paper 3: recommend a change to a design, not to behaviour
The trap: “it depends how you use it”: Agreeing with the claim is not an answer. Name a decision taken before any use, and say what value it carried.
Explain one way a design decision can carry a value.
Model answer plan
See the mark-by-mark plan — for / against / judgement, with marking guidance — in study mode.
To what extent is a technology neutral?
Model answer plan
See the mark-by-mark plan — for / against / judgement, with marking guidance — in study mode.