Skip to content

ethics.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
92 lines (66 loc) · 4.83 KB

ethics.md

File metadata and controls

92 lines (66 loc) · 4.83 KB

home | copyright ©2016, tim@menzies.us

overview | syllabus | src | submit | chat

Ethics

"Software engineers generate options faster than society can recognize, faster than lawyers can understand, and faster than courts can react. While everyone else catches up, it will be up to us to fret and worry and decide what options are (are not) imposed on society. And know this-- when the world does catch up, they may question, condone, even prosecute our decisions."
-- timm

Before we begin (from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics):

  • We believe there are unavoidable ethical dilemmas in each role of life.
  • We believe a practical ethical decision-making framework improves ethical outcomes.
  • We believe ethics should are an active concern for the poor and marginalized.
  • We believe people need a source of informed guidance on ethical dilemmas and ethical decision making.
  • We believe ethical behavior requires information, preparation, personal reflection.
  • We believe there are organizational ethical cultures and that they can be managed by creating effective structures, incentives, and communications.
  • We believe healthy ethical environments help organizations endure. institutional leaders have a critical role in creating, sustaining ethical cultures.
  • We believe individuals must demonstrate personal leadership to make good ethical choices, to strengthen ethical culture of organizations, and to lead an ethical life.
  • We believe in civility when exploring ethical dilemmas (even when complex and contested)

The last point is very important. The next hour many challenge you, a lot. And your colleagues in this room. Support each other.

The Case of the Hidden Assumption

"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter." - Nathaniel Borenstein

99 little bugs in the code
99 bugs in the code
patch one down, compile it around
117 bugs in the code

We don't even know the assumptions, the realities, we are peddling:

  • War stories from Nurse Menzies

Google search results and "reality"

News stories about how new services, like UBER, are disrupting existing services that may lead to marginalization of different groups

The sad case of the small tomato farmer

  • From Wikipedia: To withstand the rigor of the machines, new crop varieties were bred to match the automated pickers. UC Davis Professor G.C. Hanna propagated a thick-skinned tomato called VF-145. But even still, millions were damaged with impact cracks and university breeders produced a more tougher and juiceless “square round” tomato. Small farms were of insufficient size to obtain financing to purchase the equipment and within 10 years, 85% of the state's 4,000 cannery tomato farmers were out of the business. This led to a concentrated tomato industry in California that “now packed 85% of the nation’s tomato products”. The monoculture fields fostered rapid pest growth, requiring the use of “more than four million pounds of pesticides each year” which greatly affected the health of the soil, the farm workers, and possibly the consumers.[21]_
  • Silly? Won't happen to you? An expert system for raising pigs

Ethics cases from HomeMarkkula Center for Applied Ethics

  • The Right to Be Forgotten or the Right to Edit?
  • Removing a Search Result: An Ethics Case Study
  • The Psychological Experiment You Consented To in Facebook's Terms of Service -
  • Surreptitious Surveillance on the Internet:
  • Hashtag Activism and the Power of Attention: An Ethics Case Study
  • Clicking Through to the Ethics of Social Media Terms of Service: Three Case Studies -
  • Apps and Privacy: A Case Study
  • The Case of the X979 Jumpstart
  • Others (search on data mining ethics).