14 ms·

I'm just starting my 6th (and last) semester of my bachelor degree. During the semester we are exploring the ethics and morality of the modern computing evoluti

I'm just starting my 6th (and last) semester of my bachelor degree. During the semester we are exploring the ethics and morality of the modern computing evolution. The exploration includes the difference between publishers and editors, going back to basics of the "what and why" of privacy, and how companies exploit our (lack of) privacy to gain further growth. Unfortunately it's a course a lot of my classmates have expressed disdain for. To them it sounds more like a "gender-studies course" (their words) than a course for "super serious no-bullshit smart people" (my interpretation). I'm hoping the readings will have them reconsider and realize how important considering the ethical implications of their programs. As an example: a friend and a classmate works for $bigcorp. He had an idea for an employee engagement system. The idea was that every employee had a digital avatar that follows them around on the premises. So (as an example) when they go to the coffee machine their avatar high-fives the avatar of another person who's also getting coffee. This, as you can imagine, requires tracking the movement of employees to a fairly high degree. The project got two months into development before the "right" person heard about it, raised a fuzz, and got the project cancelled. Neither my friend nor my other classmates see the problem with the precise tracking of the every move of every employee - that scares me a lot.

pb7 7y ago
What was the point of this project? It sounds like an enormous waste of time (in addition to the aforementioned glaring privacy issues).
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
A "gender-studies course" criticism isn't a claim that the underlying subject doesn't matter. (Everyone can agree that gender matters!) It's a claim that they don't think the course is going to teach broadly applicable concepts and patterns of thought; they expect that you'll be presented with some particular orthodox concept of privacy, and that the class will be about learning how to correctly recite it. I can't say whether they're right about your school's course specifically, but it's certainly something I can imagine.
- Jach 7y ago
  Yes, and the GP's sentence: > Neither my friend nor my other classmates see the problem with the precise tracking of the every move of every employee - that scares me a lot. makes me think the criticism is probably valid. These sorts of classes or even trainings are exactly as you say, you're told "this is a problem" and you publicly say "yes it is" to avoid trouble, while privately you believe anything, yes or no or it's not a big deal or whatever. If you have reservations or qualifications you're not encouraged, and maybe actively discouraged, to bring them up for discussion. To take the explicit example, tracking the location of every employee isn't necessarily a problem. Context matters. (Indeed tracking the location of every moving object on earth bigger than a fist isn't necessarily a problem either, and whether or not it is one should prepare for it being in our world's future as technologies like smart dust advance to counter aggressive technology proliferation.) A class on such topics should be able to discuss different contexts apart from a baseline scenario and leave students with an understanding of why other people might or might not think such-and-such is a problem beyond a juvenile "they're stupid, ugly, and evil" -- even to tolerate not having a class consensus about scenarios with many possible subtitles, qualifications, and complications, which are the only realistically useful scenarios to talk about. A great outcome for a good course is that students may disagree on "X is a problem" or "I see a problem with X" stated without further qualifications, but are able to explain how it could or could not be or be seen as a problem with qualifications.
  - EpicBlackCrayon 7y ago
    I find it hilarious that no one does this amount of 'critical thinking' with their other classes and instead gobbles up the dribble from professors in technical subjects.
luckydata 7y ago
They don't see the problem because they haven't experienced the consequences of bad corporate environments. Some things you gotta experience on your own to truly appreciate. Everyone should have a really bad job at least once in their life.
Meekro 7y ago
We all agree that ethics matter, but would we really expect students to be more ethical after the class than they were before? Take Mozilla's firing of Brendan Eich-- we had several massive debates here about it. One side was saying that companies should be able to expel leaders whose values don't align with the ones the company wants to advance. The other side was saying that a culture where you can be fired for advocating for the wrong political position is literal McCarthyism. Would you expect an ethics class to do anything more than provide a forum for debates like these? Do you think anyone will actually change their view?
- ryacko 7y ago
  >Would you expect an ethics class to do anything more than provide a forum for debates like these? Do you think anyone will actually change their view? I've been on the receiving end of several ethical issues and find that it is often less about ethics and more about tribal politics.
- sli 7y ago
  > The other side was saying that a culture where you can be fired for advocating for the wrong political position is literal McCarthyism. So were the at-will laws that current exist discussed in extension to this or did that little detail just become the elephant in the room? Because political views are not a protected class, so their bad ending has already been here for a while. It strikes me as strange to treat that idea as a possible bad future when it's the actual present.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    In California, where Mozilla is headquartered, political views are a protected class. It's not (in principle) legal for an employer to fire you for your off-the-clock political views.
    - sfink 7y ago
      Honestly, I think the most applicable courses to that situation are civics, logic, and law. Civics to make you realize how important it is to get the actual facts of the situation, logic to understand what they mean, and law for numerous applications of those two learnings. In this case, the most relevant part is whether Eich was fired. As far as can be determined externally, he was not. Depending on your leanings, you may decide to believe (perhaps based on evidence, perhaps not) that what probably happened was morally equivalent to being fired -- but again, logic and law say that doesn't matter. If the law says you can't do X when condition Y holds, but Y is kind of blurry and hard to determine precisely, then all that means exactly nothing if you didn't do X. Feel free to debate the legality or the ethics, but please don't get them mixed up.
FisDugthop 7y ago
Put up a public Web page with your friend's location. Every time they do anything, update the page. After a day, show them the page, and explain what you've done. See if it gets through their thick skull then!
tomjen3 7y ago
I have never seen an ethics course that actually answers useful questions and changes the behaviors of the those who take them. In the real world anyway being ethical is often a hinderance, and somebody else will be brought in to do the project (I have no moral issues with auto-shooting AI-targeting drones, if anything the world has a lot of bad guys[1] who needs to be dead with no civilian casualties[2]). Also remember, no good dead goes unpunished. [1]: as a minimum this would be the leadership of all countries that opposes freedom by jailing or killing members or leaders of the opposition. [2]: a seal team took out ISIS leader, but he still managed to blow his suicide vest and killed 3 of his kids.
- vkou 7y ago
  > I have never seen an ethics course that actually answers useful questions and changes the behaviors of the those who take them. My ethics course handled a number of issues. The only one I viscerally remember was Therac-25. > that opposes freedom by jailing or killing members or leaders of the opposition. With such a broad definition of bad guys, I think you've just listed the leaders of every country. I'm not sure that's your intent, but it if it is, it's quite a radical position.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Therac-25? That's normally taught as a safety and correctness issue, not an ethical issue. What exactly is the ethical lesson from Therac-25? Always use hardware interlocks when building machines that can kill people? Don't be over-confident and believe user bug reports? There were lots of lessons to learn from Therac-25 but I'm not sure any of them would be classified as ethical.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Is that your personal definition of ethics? Just kill anyone you disagree with? No that's just a crazy fantasy. It is unethical to pretend to "help" someone by intentionally using an ineffective solution to make yourself look good without putting in the effort. This is basically a lesser form of hero complex/syndrome. You see a problem, think of a solution that makes you look like a hero and everyone is worse off except you. Celebrities visiting poor african villages is probably the most obvious occurence of this. They book an expensive flight and hotel and drive a car and when they arrive they just do minor help for a week but hey everyone sees it on my instagram account!!!
codingmess 7y ago
Tracking is not automatically unethical. People could choose to do it for fun with their friends. They could enable it just on campus. People can be tracked by anonymous parties via their cell phones, anyway, so deliberate sharing for fun may not seem so bad. Not that I see the point of the particular project, but I also think not every possible kind of fun should be illegal because of "privacy". A better example would perhaps be Pokemon Go. Lots of people enjoy playing that game. The question is how does Niantic use the data, but a game like that would not automatically have to exploit the data. The evil information that can be extracted from the location data may also be exaggerated.
_bxg1 7y ago
I took one of those courses; it wasn't intellectually stimulating and it felt like a condescending, corporate-mandated seminar. Even the professor was just going through the motions. But it doesn't have to be that way, that's just how it tends to play out. What we need are not "ethics in tech" courses, but for people in tech to get more exposure to general humanities education. Require everyone getting a degree at your university - computer science majors included - to read and discuss classic literature, history, and philosophy. Exercise the parts of their brain that deal with questions whose answers can't be reduced to code. Ethics cannot be covered by a pamphlet of tech-specific rules; to act ethically, a person needs perspective on human nature and on what it means to be a member of society.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > Require everyone - computer science majors included - to read and discuss classic literature, history, and philosophy. These books/things taught me nothing (nil) about ethics - they are about questions that were relevant centuries ago. On the other hand: good hard science-fiction literature sometimes is able to teach you one or two relevant things - even though I admit that ratio "text-to-read" to "important lessons learned" is rather low (i.e. you have to read immense amounts to get few important lessons). Because I love science-fiction, this is rather unimportant to me, but for people who follow my advice and now start to read science-fiction literature to learn some ethics lessons will be deeply disappointed if they have no deep love for the science-fiction genre.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    I won't say science-fiction never has substantive ethical content, but one definitely needs more than that. > they are about questions that were relevant centuries ago It's clear you're missing the point: ethics that are specific to a given technology, or even a specific social structure, are of limited value. If a person's moral system is going to be rich enough to apply itself to new technologies and situations that nobody has ever faced before, one needs a broad perspective on the human condition. A deeper understanding of right and wrong and the in-between. Civilization was very different centuries ago, but people were not.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> the problem with the precise tracking of the every move of every employee This is why they love open offices (not because it encourages “collaboration”, because it doesn’t).
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I understand what my avatar will do when I go get that morning coffee at about 8:30 am but what will my avatar do at about 9:15 when I lock myself in the bathroom stall for ~10 minutes?
matz1 7y ago
>Neither my friend nor my other classmates see the problem with the precise tracking of the every move of every employee - that scares me a lot. Thats the thing with ethics, its completely subjective.
hinkley 7y ago
There's a common complaint that "Business Ethics" courses degenerate into a HowTo for getting away with stuff on a technicality or by feigning ignorance. We're in good company... bad company... we are not the only ones experiencing this problem.
bigger_cheese 7y ago
As part of my 4 year Engineering degree we had to do a couple of these types of courses. In first year there was a subject focused around class discussions I can remember each week we'd be given an issue we'd go and do research on the issue then we'd discuss it the next week in class. The lecturer would kind of guide us by asking leading questions but it was mostly back and fourth free discussion talking about pros and cons of issue etc. It was a relatively soft subject but the discussions in class were always lively and I found it pretty interesting the diversity of opinions that would come up often people in the classroom would have very different ideas and there would be points raised I hadn't previously considered. I can remember one discussion around implications of GM Food (which was topical at the time) sparked some really heated discussion. I thought the subject was really good at opening us up to deeper ethical considerations. In Later Years we had a subject focused on Engineering disasters and failures things like Bhopal, Challenger, Kansas City Walkway etc. How can we learn from these events how can we apply those learning to everyday practice. There was also a fourth year subject which included a guest lecturer from the Law Faculty which covered things like Liability, Professional Responsibility, Codes of Practice. It included discussion on Whistle-blowing and disclosure. Software world can feel quite a bit different the same requirements around responsibility and liability don't exist which effects the culture somewhat.

pb7 7y ago

What was the point of this project? It sounds like an enormous waste of time (in addition to the aforementioned glaring privacy issues).

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

A "gender-studies course" criticism isn't a claim that the underlying subject doesn't matter. (Everyone can agree that gender matters!) It's a claim that they don't think the course is going to teach broadly applicable concepts and patterns of thought; they expect that you'll be presented with some particular orthodox concept of privacy, and that the class will be about learning how to correctly recite it. I can't say whether they're right about your school's course specifically, but it's certainly something I can imagine.

Jach 7y ago
Yes, and the GP's sentence: > Neither my friend nor my other classmates see the problem with the precise tracking of the every move of every employee - that scares me a lot. makes me think the criticism is probably valid. These sorts of classes or even trainings are exactly as you say, you're told "this is a problem" and you publicly say "yes it is" to avoid trouble, while privately you believe anything, yes or no or it's not a big deal or whatever. If you have reservations or qualifications you're not encouraged, and maybe actively discouraged, to bring them up for discussion. To take the explicit example, tracking the location of every employee isn't necessarily a problem. Context matters. (Indeed tracking the location of every moving object on earth bigger than a fist isn't necessarily a problem either, and whether or not it is one should prepare for it being in our world's future as technologies like smart dust advance to counter aggressive technology proliferation.) A class on such topics should be able to discuss different contexts apart from a baseline scenario and leave students with an understanding of why other people might or might not think such-and-such is a problem beyond a juvenile "they're stupid, ugly, and evil" -- even to tolerate not having a class consensus about scenarios with many possible subtitles, qualifications, and complications, which are the only realistically useful scenarios to talk about. A great outcome for a good course is that students may disagree on "X is a problem" or "I see a problem with X" stated without further qualifications, but are able to explain how it could or could not be or be seen as a problem with qualifications.
- EpicBlackCrayon 7y ago
  I find it hilarious that no one does this amount of 'critical thinking' with their other classes and instead gobbles up the dribble from professors in technical subjects.

luckydata 7y ago

They don't see the problem because they haven't experienced the consequences of bad corporate environments. Some things you gotta experience on your own to truly appreciate. Everyone should have a really bad job at least once in their life.

Meekro 7y ago

We all agree that ethics matter, but would we really expect students to be more ethical after the class than they were before? Take Mozilla's firing of Brendan Eich-- we had several massive debates here about it. One side was saying that companies should be able to expel leaders whose values don't align with the ones the company wants to advance. The other side was saying that a culture where you can be fired for advocating for the wrong political position is literal McCarthyism. Would you expect an ethics class to do anything more than provide a forum for debates like these? Do you think anyone will actually change their view?

ryacko 7y ago
>Would you expect an ethics class to do anything more than provide a forum for debates like these? Do you think anyone will actually change their view? I've been on the receiving end of several ethical issues and find that it is often less about ethics and more about tribal politics.
sli 7y ago
> The other side was saying that a culture where you can be fired for advocating for the wrong political position is literal McCarthyism. So were the at-will laws that current exist discussed in extension to this or did that little detail just become the elephant in the room? Because political views are not a protected class, so their bad ending has already been here for a while. It strikes me as strange to treat that idea as a possible bad future when it's the actual present.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  In California, where Mozilla is headquartered, political views are a protected class. It's not (in principle) legal for an employer to fire you for your off-the-clock political views.
  - sfink 7y ago
    Honestly, I think the most applicable courses to that situation are civics, logic, and law. Civics to make you realize how important it is to get the actual facts of the situation, logic to understand what they mean, and law for numerous applications of those two learnings. In this case, the most relevant part is whether Eich was fired. As far as can be determined externally, he was not. Depending on your leanings, you may decide to believe (perhaps based on evidence, perhaps not) that what probably happened was morally equivalent to being fired -- but again, logic and law say that doesn't matter. If the law says you can't do X when condition Y holds, but Y is kind of blurry and hard to determine precisely, then all that means exactly nothing if you didn't do X. Feel free to debate the legality or the ethics, but please don't get them mixed up.

FisDugthop 7y ago

Put up a public Web page with your friend's location. Every time they do anything, update the page. After a day, show them the page, and explain what you've done. See if it gets through their thick skull then!

tomjen3 7y ago

I have never seen an ethics course that actually answers useful questions and changes the behaviors of the those who take them. In the real world anyway being ethical is often a hinderance, and somebody else will be brought in to do the project (I have no moral issues with auto-shooting AI-targeting drones, if anything the world has a lot of bad guys[1] who needs to be dead with no civilian casualties[2]). Also remember, no good dead goes unpunished. [1]: as a minimum this would be the leadership of all countries that opposes freedom by jailing or killing members or leaders of the opposition. [2]: a seal team took out ISIS leader, but he still managed to blow his suicide vest and killed 3 of his kids.

vkou 7y ago
> I have never seen an ethics course that actually answers useful questions and changes the behaviors of the those who take them. My ethics course handled a number of issues. The only one I viscerally remember was Therac-25. > that opposes freedom by jailing or killing members or leaders of the opposition. With such a broad definition of bad guys, I think you've just listed the leaders of every country. I'm not sure that's your intent, but it if it is, it's quite a radical position.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- thu2111 7y ago
  Therac-25? That's normally taught as a safety and correctness issue, not an ethical issue. What exactly is the ethical lesson from Therac-25? Always use hardware interlocks when building machines that can kill people? Don't be over-confident and believe user bug reports? There were lots of lessons to learn from Therac-25 but I'm not sure any of them would be classified as ethical.
imtringued 7y ago
Is that your personal definition of ethics? Just kill anyone you disagree with? No that's just a crazy fantasy. It is unethical to pretend to "help" someone by intentionally using an ineffective solution to make yourself look good without putting in the effort. This is basically a lesser form of hero complex/syndrome. You see a problem, think of a solution that makes you look like a hero and everyone is worse off except you. Celebrities visiting poor african villages is probably the most obvious occurence of this. They book an expensive flight and hotel and drive a car and when they arrive they just do minor help for a week but hey everyone sees it on my instagram account!!!

codingmess 7y ago

Tracking is not automatically unethical. People could choose to do it for fun with their friends. They could enable it just on campus. People can be tracked by anonymous parties via their cell phones, anyway, so deliberate sharing for fun may not seem so bad. Not that I see the point of the particular project, but I also think not every possible kind of fun should be illegal because of "privacy". A better example would perhaps be Pokemon Go. Lots of people enjoy playing that game. The question is how does Niantic use the data, but a game like that would not automatically have to exploit the data. The evil information that can be extracted from the location data may also be exaggerated.

_bxg1 7y ago

I took one of those courses; it wasn't intellectually stimulating and it felt like a condescending, corporate-mandated seminar. Even the professor was just going through the motions. But it doesn't have to be that way, that's just how it tends to play out. What we need are not "ethics in tech" courses, but for people in tech to get more exposure to general humanities education. Require everyone getting a degree at your university - computer science majors included - to read and discuss classic literature, history, and philosophy. Exercise the parts of their brain that deal with questions whose answers can't be reduced to code. Ethics cannot be covered by a pamphlet of tech-specific rules; to act ethically, a person needs perspective on human nature and on what it means to be a member of society.

wolfgke 7y ago
> Require everyone - computer science majors included - to read and discuss classic literature, history, and philosophy. These books/things taught me nothing (nil) about ethics - they are about questions that were relevant centuries ago. On the other hand: good hard science-fiction literature sometimes is able to teach you one or two relevant things - even though I admit that ratio "text-to-read" to "important lessons learned" is rather low (i.e. you have to read immense amounts to get few important lessons). Because I love science-fiction, this is rather unimportant to me, but for people who follow my advice and now start to read science-fiction literature to learn some ethics lessons will be deeply disappointed if they have no deep love for the science-fiction genre.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I won't say science-fiction never has substantive ethical content, but one definitely needs more than that. > they are about questions that were relevant centuries ago It's clear you're missing the point: ethics that are specific to a given technology, or even a specific social structure, are of limited value. If a person's moral system is going to be rich enough to apply itself to new technologies and situations that nobody has ever faced before, one needs a broad perspective on the human condition. A deeper understanding of right and wrong and the in-between. Civilization was very different centuries ago, but people were not.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> the problem with the precise tracking of the every move of every employee This is why they love open offices (not because it encourages “collaboration”, because it doesn’t).

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

I understand what my avatar will do when I go get that morning coffee at about 8:30 am but what will my avatar do at about 9:15 when I lock myself in the bathroom stall for ~10 minutes?

matz1 7y ago

>Neither my friend nor my other classmates see the problem with the precise tracking of the every move of every employee - that scares me a lot. Thats the thing with ethics, its completely subjective.

hinkley 7y ago

There's a common complaint that "Business Ethics" courses degenerate into a HowTo for getting away with stuff on a technicality or by feigning ignorance. We're in good company... bad company... we are not the only ones experiencing this problem.

bigger_cheese 7y ago

As part of my 4 year Engineering degree we had to do a couple of these types of courses. In first year there was a subject focused around class discussions I can remember each week we'd be given an issue we'd go and do research on the issue then we'd discuss it the next week in class. The lecturer would kind of guide us by asking leading questions but it was mostly back and fourth free discussion talking about pros and cons of issue etc. It was a relatively soft subject but the discussions in class were always lively and I found it pretty interesting the diversity of opinions that would come up often people in the classroom would have very different ideas and there would be points raised I hadn't previously considered. I can remember one discussion around implications of GM Food (which was topical at the time) sparked some really heated discussion. I thought the subject was really good at opening us up to deeper ethical considerations. In Later Years we had a subject focused on Engineering disasters and failures things like Bhopal, Challenger, Kansas City Walkway etc. How can we learn from these events how can we apply those learning to everyday practice. There was also a fourth year subject which included a guest lecturer from the Law Faculty which covered things like Liability, Professional Responsibility, Codes of Practice. It included discussion on Whistle-blowing and disclosure. Software world can feel quite a bit different the same requirements around responsibility and liability don't exist which effects the culture somewhat.