You hear a lot today about artificial intelligence and ethics, and for good reason. As algorithms get smarter, they are increasingly making decisions that affect people’s lives. We need to be careful these algorithms are fair and transparent – but it’s not only the algorithms that are concerning.

If Tom Wolfe were still alive, he might be turning his critical pen towards people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or the Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, playfully describing the disruption that their companies bring to our lives on a daily basis.

Just as Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities focused on the financiers whose greed defined the economy of the 1980s, the writer might today focus on the behaviour of these entrepreneurs whose technological innovations are overthrowing the old economy, creating entirely new digital marketplaces.

And rather than the greed of the 1980s, ethics might be the focus of Wolfe’s attention. Not the ethics of the algorithms running these businesses, for algorithms don’t have ethics. Even smart algorithms don’t have ethics.

Algorithms are just bits of mathematics. Algorithms do, however, capture the ethics of the people behind them. And there is so much material Wolfe could write about this in 2018.

Wind back the clock nearly two years. In October 2016, the investigative nonprofit newsroom ProPublica discovered that Facebook let advertisers exclude black, Hispanic and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing adverts.

In the United States, housing and job adverts that exclude people based on race, gender and similar factors are prohibited by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Facebook admitted this was “a failure” and promised to prevent such discrimination in the future.

More than a year later, in November 2017, ProPublica found Facebook was still allowing such adverts to be placed. This is not a failure to write ethical algorithms. This is a failure to care.

Give any programmer access to the Facebook code base, and it would take less than an afternoon to remove such functionality from the system. In March 2018, fair housing groups filed a lawsuit in the federal courts to stop Facebook selling discriminative adverts. Perhaps this will be enough to make Facebook care?

It is easy to pick on almost every other large technology company. Take Google, for example. In the US, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (Coppa) prohibits operators of websites from collecting any personal information on children without parental consent.

In April 2018, 20 advocacy, consumer and privacy groups filed a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission saying Google was violating Coppa by collecting information about the location, phone numbers and viewing habits of children watching YouTube videos without parental consent.

Google’s lawyers responded that YouTube is not intended for children aged less than 13, as its terms of service require users to be over this age. This is just laughing in our faces.

The managers of YouTube know that millions of children are watching its videos. Search for “kids” videos on YouTube and you get over 177m results. Or check out the official Sesame Street, National Geographic Kids or Peppa Pig channels on YouTube. These clearly aren’t aimed at adults.

Google is using the information it collects on YouTube to sell adverts targeted at children. Google doesn’t want to fix this because it makes a lot of money out of having children watch YouTube and collecting information on them.

Incidentally, Mark Zuckerberg has gone on record saying he intends to fight Coppa so he can get children on Facebook at an earlier age. This is despite the concerns of child development experts about the dangers of exposing children to social media at a young age.

This isn’t the first time we’ve faced such problems. In the first industrial revolution, some of the first to benefit were so rapacious they became known as the “Robber Barons”. Chief among them was the industrialist John D Rockefeller, arguably the wealthiest man to live in modern times. Rockefeller was notorious for the unethical and illegal business practices that helped his company Standard Oil control up to 90% of the world’s oil refineries.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John D Rockefeller (left). Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

The History of the Standard Oil Company, published by Ida Tarbell in 1904, described the espionage, price wars and courtroom antics that allowed the company to dominate the oil business. Eventually Standard Oil became so powerful it had to be broken up into 34 new companies. To balance the power of corporations, we also introduced institutions like unions, labour laws and the welfare state so that workers would share the benefits that industrialisation brought.

Today, we have a new set of robber barons, running digital monopolies and again receiving disproportionate benefits from the disruption brought about by new technology. History tells us we will need to regulate their monopolies just as we regulated previous monopolies.

The six biggest companies on the planet today by market cap are now technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Microsoft, Facebook and Alibaba. With this immense wealth comes immense impact and responsibility. We’ve always had to regulate markets; unfettered capitalism tends to go to excess. Regulation is needed to ensure that companies act in line with the public good and not just the stock options of their CEOs.

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These technology companies have brought much good disruption into our lives, but not all has been beneficial. To ensure others can compete, we need to start by breaking some of them up. In the case of Google, this would be easy – by setting up Alphabet, it helpfully identified parts of the company that could operate independently.

We also need to mandate data portability. Many people are disappointed with Facebook, but the price of moving is too great for them to leave. If they could move our data easily, Facebook would have to behave better or risk seeing its users depart for other sites.

And finally, we need to tax corporations more aggressively so we can all share the benefits. According to the European commission, global technology companies pay just 9.5% tax, compared with 23.2% for other companies. The irony is that they could easily afford to pay more. Most use their vast profits in share buyback schemes that inflate their share price. Buying your own shares is pure financial laziness.

We faced up to the robber barons previously. And now, it seems, we need to do so again.