5.10 Ethical and Social Implications of Computing Systems
In this lesson, you will look at the professional computing code of ethics, system reliability, legal issues and intellectual property concerns, and bias in computing.
This is a time of rapid advancements in technology and automation. Software and hardware engineers increasingly have significant impacts on everyday lives with the tools and applications that they create. You see software and hardware solutions in nearly every aspect of your lives, such as the cars you drive, your bank accounts, the electrical grid, and nearly all communication such as email, text, and phone calls. If these systems fail, your lives would be greatly impacted.
Part of understanding the impact of these tools and applications is understanding system reliability. System reliability is when all programs and code will work as intended. Its challenging to ensure system reliability when there are many inputs, parameters and outputs in any given programming application. System reliability is limited and programmers should make an effort to maximize system reliability. Software and hardware engineers need to be aware of the legal, social and ethical implications of the hardware and programmatic systems that they create.
While programs are designed to achieve a specific purpose, they may have unintended consequences. Computing systems have affected humans, society, economy, and culture in many ways, both positively and negatively.
One substantial impact of computing systems is the access to information. There are several open databases of scientific publications on the internet, some of which are free and some are subscription based. This allows scientific papers to be read by anyone, not just a graduate student at a research institution. Now anyone can read these cutting edge scientific publications.
But there’s a big question as to whether access to all information is actually a good thing. For example, there’s a website called Wikileaks that posts classified information that either governments or corporations are trying to keep secret. On one hand this is a good thing because it promotes the transparency of information. It makes it so corporations and the governments can’t keep secrets from its citizens. However, there’s potential danger in having classified secrets being public. For example, our military or national security could be at risk if someone posts our government secrets to the world.
Legal issues and intellectual property concerns arise when creating programs. As programmers, you have a responsibility to make sure that our programs are socially, legally, and ethically acceptable.
Computer science follows the following ACMs or Association for Computing Machinery professional code of ethics. ACM has professional principles as well, but they are beyond the scope of this course. According to the ACM, a computing professional should:
- Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing.
- Avoid harm.
- Be honest and trustworthy.
- Be fair and take action not to discriminate.
- Respect the work required to produce new ideas, inventions, creative works, and computing artifacts.
- Respect privacy.
- Honor confidentiality.
Remember that knowledge is power as everyone lives together in our digital world. Use your knowledge of computing for good purposes so you and everyone else can be safe and enjoy the benefits of computing.
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A computing system that is biased is likely to