Thread by @EmilyGorcenski

I’ll be live tweeting an Ethics in Computing talk from #srecon here momentarily so feel free to mute this thread.

Ethics in Computing: A Young Profession Coping with Ethical Debt

Theo Schlossnagle starts by taking about the need to be outraged on stage. I know this feel. “It’s hard not to be angry when things happen every day” (paraphrased)

The word “deontology “ just appeared on the slide so buckle in.

Theo notes that as programmers we like rules and duties (and exploiting loopholes in them)

Ethics is not about binary right or wrong, but about a framework of ascertaining the value of what is right or wrong action.

Theo notes that ethics only exist within the context of human society, and that society changes over time.

Most doctors don’t take the original Hippocratic oath, as the original oath would prevent abortion, but many nations’ moral context has changed.

He notes that “genocide” as a term was invented to describe a moral wrong that was, at the time, considered new

(Not that genocide was not considered wrong before, but that the social structures that allowed one to define it as such were not universal constructs)

Theo goes into an example from a company I probably need to recuse myself from describing, but it involves a manufacturer hacking rules to get around regulations.

Now he describes Uber’s application, Greyball, which was an application that hide usage from regulators. This was not the original application but ended up being used as a deliberate attempt to bypass the law.

In keeping with the Uber, we describes Uber’s autonomous vehicle operations. [nb: this is a topic I have spoken *extensively* about]

“The purpose of autonomous vehicles is to kill people... but less often than people kill people.”

“A computer killing someone is a hard ethical question; driving an unlicensed vehicle through a city with no regard for the law is not.”

He discusses the astral a heat map issue and notes that the problem wasn’t disclosing military bases—military bases have guns to defend themselves!—but it became a bike theft facilitation tool

Another example of Black folks not getting detected by things like automated soap dispensers.

These failures expose the total lack of diversity in the industry. But for many cases the combinatorics of harm are not solvable just through representation—we need to think critically

[the sheer number of ethical morasses in the tech industry is so staggering that case studies, at this point, are so numerous as to feel normalized]

The ACM’s last revision of the Code of Ethics was in 1992. This has finally been updated in 2018. [nb tomorrow I’ll be discussing this]

The IEEE has a similar document that covers how to dissent at work.

[the anarchist in me has opinions]

Takeaway: Keep records of every single thing.

[I endorse this. Leave paper trails EVERYWHERE]

The talk is done. Sorry for obliterating your feeds! 💕💕