TROY — Careers in the technology sector are rapidly growing in the Capital Region and across the country, and corporations are heightening their recruitment efforts to keep up with a demand for talent.

But students from the Silicon Valley to the Hudson Valley say there's been a lack of conversation in their classrooms about the potential pitfalls and social implications of technology, and the morally dubious tasks some of the more well-known — and well-paying — tech companies may ask them to perform as employees.

One group at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute made its own space to host those discussions. Jacob Kaplan, an RPI senior studying computer science, created Rensselaer for Ethics in Science, Engineering and Technology (RESET) over the summer, disillusioned after seeing news reports of tech companies working with law enforcement and government.

“We try to combat this whole idea of ‘innovation for innovation’s sake, without really stopping to think what it is that we’re creating,'" Kaplan said. "We’re just trying to promote peeling back the layers and really thinking about what it is we’re working on and what the effects are going to be.”

The club was hatched after Kaplan posted on a local subreddit asking if others wanted to start a discussion group. The response was immediate, he said. About 10 people went to RESET's first meeting, a higher turnout than he expected during the school's quieter summer months. During a recent meeting, about 20 people gathered in a room at the university's library, exploring topics like Amazon's facial-recognition and Ring surveillance technology, and other corporations that contract with the federal government to develop weapons systems. The group has more than 90 members on the chat app Discord.

Other student groups have reached out to partner with RESET, and the club is now planning an alternative career fair, hosting what Kaplan described as "ethically minded companies, not these large behemoths."

"People are much more reluctant to want to go work for a big tech company nowadays, and I think that’s probably why we’ve been getting a lot of traction," Kaplan said. "I think there is an increased awareness of these issues. People do see the need of having these kinds of dialogs."

This sort of skepticism — or "techlash" — can be complicated for students who have put themselves in debt going to school and are offered big-money jobs at companies with recognizable names. Kaplan said he knows people who studied aeronautics hoping to work in the space industry. But since the industry is hard to break into, they ended up working with ballistics technology.

"If they don’t wind up sending rockets to the moon, they have to wind up sending rockets to Yemen,” he said. “That’s just the reality for them.”

Eric Hagegard, a freshman majoring in mechanical engineering and philosophy, said the safety and money offered by those large corporations is tempting. "I think that it’s very easy to be brought under their wing and no longer consider the moral implications," he said.

But Hagegard said he enjoys RESET's meetings because they are usually attended by naturally skeptical people.

"There were people who were really interested in critical thinking and taking things less at face value and more at analyzing things," Hagagard said. "It struck me as a really genuine attempt.”

Discussions aren't held in a vacuum, and the club sees the same wide range of discourse that would be expected when any group of college students gets together, said Audrey Beard, a third-year computer science Ph.D student studying computer vision and machine learning.

"I see a lack of real, meaningful criticism of our fields," Beard said. "When I look at the discourse that occurs in these spaces, it’s often about technological solutions that don’t fundamentally question power structures or don’t really fold in discussions from outside of the field."

Beard said they have seen first-hand how STEM fields can sometimes be hesitant to open up to different political ideologies, or to the black, queer and feminine perspectives. RESET provides a springboard to hold the types of conversations that aren't generally discussed, they said.

"Generally speaking, everybody in the group notices problems in STEM, whether it’s at an industry level, an educational level, or an individual-development level, and fundamentally that’s what brings us together and that’s what spurs all of the discussion," they said. "I think that ultimately we have similar goals and similar ideas to problems that we see, and that's what this is about."

Michael.Williams@timesunion.com or 518-454-5018.