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Ethical Dilemmas Related to Technology
Anonymous Coward writes "I have a relative who will be teaching a college class on the topic of ethical dilemmas brought about by new technology. Unfortunately, he doesn't keep up with technology news, so he's not sure what the most relevant dilemmas are. For example, 'If robots came alive, would we be justified in killing them?' is one that might come up if nothing more relevant were suggested. (OK, it might not be that bad, but you get the idea. He was using Netscape 4.76 on system 9 until last week.)
So, what are the most relevant ethical dilemmas brought up by technology? Note that I am looking for ethical dilemmas, e.g. 'Is Activity X moral?' rather than legal dilemmas like 'Is the DMCA constitutional?' Now is your chance to guide the young minds of the future toward stuff that matters."
It is commonly held that a species becoming extinct is bad. Does it therefore follow that creating a new species through genetic engineering is good? If not, why not?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Spam is such an easy ethical problem.
It's mostly legal, but highly unethical, since it involves cost-shifting and most of times hijacking open relays and other unsecured resources to send out that crap. And it annoys 99% of all recipients.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
A very simple ethical dilemma - if a machine can do what ten people can, is it unethical to take away their jobs in the name of saving money? I mean, these are real humans we are talking about!
On a side note, I'm an information systems specialist, and the systems I design do flatten organizations and often eliminate people's jobs. This issue is one I often think about.
Is there a balance between how much machine replaces man?
Just my 2 cents..
-6d
is Google. "ethical dilemmas" technology yields some good ones, and some false positives; here's an interesting paper.
The first hit and one of my favorite questions, which I've debated to some length with friends in the past, is to what extent you can observe your workers' use of the Internet. After all, their traffic runs through your servers in a manner akin to a person shouting cell-phone conversations; but should you accept that those 8 hours a day will not all be spent filling TPS reports, or should you employ Draconian tactics to monitor users' porn-site usage?
Another interesting one, less IT-related but also interesting, is the economic issue: if the application of certain expensive technology can save human lives, should it be used, to whom should it be offered, and who should have to pay?
Perhaps one day SETI will present us with another dilemma: If you know a religion to be false, should you tell its followers? Some would say this is already an issue in the modern information-enabled world.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
- Napster/music stuff and the idea of copyright.
- Privacy issues. Can email be examined? Can one "tap" a network to discover information? Can a disk account be examined. What are the conditions. Are they any different than mail/phone?
- Ownership issues. If I work for a company/university, do they own all the code I write or only "some" of it. What are the conditions?
- Hacking. Should "innocent" hacking (non-damaging, no gain by hacker) be prosecuted. What about someone identifying security problems.
Also, what is unusual, in general, about technology unique in comparison to previous work in ethics? Anything?What code of ethis should system administrators operate under? Should there be an external code, agreed upon by some standards body or should a sysadmin simply do whatever the policies of the company she works for dictate?
Some examples:
1) A person in management who is not the boss of employee Jane Doe asks the sysadmin for files in Jane's network space. The person asking is above Jane in the heirarchy, but not in the the org chart path to Jane. Say a manager in another department. Should the sysadmin just give the files to the manager or ask that the request come from either the sysadmin's boss or from Jane's boss.
2) Should a company that doesn't actively close ports used by file sharing programs be liable for employees that use those programs. The company provided the bandwidth after all and could easily have blocked the ports.
3) Jane brings her computer to you as a professional repair person to fix a part. While fixing the computer, you browse through her files to make sure everything is working correctly. You notice some files have interesting names and discover that Jane is having an affair. Do you tell her husband? Should Jane be able to sue you for breach of confidentiality if you do?
4) Should tech people be made mandatory reporters? School teachers, doctors, and counselors can be made mandatory reporters of child abuse. What if we aren't talking about kiddie porn, but the parents are drug dealers?
What if it is "just" pot?
5) What responsibility, if any, do users/resellers have for groundwater contamination by the dumping of old computers?
6) You work for a nonprofit organization that must use Microsoft Access to work with some data (in other words, you can't just shout, "Switch to open source alternatives" and make the problem go away). You can't afford the 10 copies of Access you need, so you say that since only 1 person will probably use it at a time, you can install 1 copy on 10 different computers. Is this moral? It is illegal, but the class wasn't about legalities, it was about morality. This is akin to the steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving family question. Well, what if your family don't like bread? What if they like cigarettes? And what if instead of stealing them, they were selling them at a price that was practically giving them away?
And that's just a few off the top of my head.
Take a look at A Gift of Fire by Sara Baase, which explores social and ethical issues of computing technology. This was my textbook for my computer ethics class in school, and is a good read whether you need a textbook or not. It discusses, for example, the Terac-25 incident, where a software probem in a radiation-therapy machine gave truly massive overdoses (over 100x intended) to cancer patients, causing severe injury and death. This was one of the first cases where poor programming (in conjunction with other design flaws) directly caused death and injury in the public sector. It goes on to discuss both ethical benefits (such as revolutionizing business by providing information technology, reducing paper usage, etc) and hot ethical topics (privacy issues, safety issues, freedom of speech, computer crime, etc).
Here's a question: is any intelligence truly artificial?
I mean, if a robot, toaster, or what ever has sentience, intelligence, and all the thinkgs that we think make us special, even if it was manufactured, is that intelligence truly "artificial" or is it "real"? If not, then at what point does it become real? When did it stop being just semi-programmed responses and boolean algorythms and become something more? When do we say that you can dismantle that car, but you can't disassemble that robot (without its expressed permission)?
Suppose there's something (like heart disease) that afflicts 10% of the population. Faced with an uncertain future, Joe (and his 9 cohorts) buys insurance so that he can pay for treatment if he is the unlucky 10%.
Now suppose that improving technology (like DNA sequencing) allows us to predict the future: Joe will get heart disease (and his 9 cohorts won't). Since the future is certain, the insurance market vanishes. No one will sell Joe insurance, because he is a known loss, and his 9 cohorts won't buy insurance, because they know that they won't need it.
Now when Joe gets heart disease, he can't afford treatment. Do we as a society institute some kind of welfare system to pay for Joe's treatment? Or do we just leave him to die?
Is it more important to get technology such as the Internet into the hands of residents of the 3rd world, or to use more traditional approaches to increasing their welfare, such as food donation, education, transfer of farming tech, etc?
Several years ago, Bill Joy wrote an article in
"Wired" called "The Future Doesn't Need You." In it
he outlined what he thought were the three biggest
areas of ethical ambiguity:
1> Artificial Intelligence
2> Nanotechnology
3> Bioengineering
Because he quoted the Unabomber in the article, that is all anyone ever talked about and his very valid ethical concerns were swept away by media hype. If your relative is teaching a class, this article might be useful.
Given the current concern/scare tactics regarding
"weapons of mass destruction" Joy's piece is as
relevant now as the day he wrote it.
You can't help here but get into the debate about whether anything is really ever invented or simply discovered.
This is good, related, and thought-provoking. If these "creations" are actually discoveries rather than inventions, then one might argue that someone will eventually find the dangerous discoveries, so as a responsible scientist, one must look these even more aggressively, if only to better understand (and thereby be better prepared to control or limit damages from) them.
Sorta like the guy who developed and patented the way to keep a monkey (tested) or human (untested) head alive without a body, and then patented it to prevent evil genius torturers and insane governments with space-exploration hopes dashed by low-payload limits from exploiting them. I googled for a link, but failed -- anyone help me out on this -- or was it a hoax (very possible)?
everything in moderation
If we can choose the sex of a baby, it's moral to do it? What about the color of the eyes?
If we can know the probable lifespan of a person by looking at its DNA, should we allow an insurance policy based on it? Even if it's presented as a "discount" for sturdier people?
If we can exterminate an entire species, are we morally allowed to do it? Well we did it (almost) with the variola virus, but you could argue if a virus is alive. We'll soon be able to do it with mosquitoes, the tse-tse fly. Those are pests, but should they be erased from the face of earth? What about rats?
Some day in the not too distant future, all nations of earth will have an infectious pathogen agent with 98% fatality rate, six weeks of incubation (of which three in contagious state), and a safe vaccine for their own population. The nuclear arms race will look positively sedate in comparation. Should we (whoever this "we" is, soon it will be everybody) strike first?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Go read Bill Joy's article, "Why the future doesn't need us." Possibly the best discussion I've seen on the dangers of future (and present!) technology. Some points he brings up or alludes to:
- Should we, as a society, curtail research on particular branches of science? Human cloning is the obvious one, but researching superbugs and genetically hand-made viruses might have enormous benefits--at a cost of extreme risk.
- Where do we draw the line between human and (for lack of a better word) robot? Nanotech, implants, and genetic mods are all coming to meet at a common point, and that point is SOON!
Some other interesting technological dillemas come to mind. Should we sell or aid the development of technology to 'enemy' nations? How do we define enemies for this purpose? I happen to work for a company that's substantially responsible for getting much of the US military aircraft into the air--am I partly responsible for the use those aircraft are put to? The same question could be (and has been) asked of the Canadian CANDU nuclear reactors--safe, cheap, efficient, reliable, and the easiest way to produce weapons-grade material.
This last one is actually a dillema as old as the hills--dealing with the enemy--but technology is becoming an important factor because it's drawing the world together. (Not to mention the HUGE role technology plays in any conflict these days)
Other issues: Technology eats power, consumes resources, produces waste--do we have a moral responsiblilty to drive as much technological innovation as possible towards cleaning up some of our messes?
The media is now able to modify live broadcasts--how do we control that behaviour? Pasting over footage of billboards with the station's advertising is pretty reprehensible, but what about when they start adding nonexistent people to war scenes?
But the real question may boil down to this simple one: How does technology actually change any of our present moral or ethical states? Does technology actually change our ethics, and should it?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
1) Is technological progress inherently good? Who does it benefit and who does it hurt (if any)? If technological progress is inherently good, are scientists ethically or morally responsible for their inventions? Are consumers responsible for their use of technology?
2) We are seeing that technology is making the world increasingly dangerous in the form of "asynchronous threats" or rather individual empowerment through technology that cannot be foreseen or prevented. (briefcase bombs, artificially engineered diseases, computer viruses, etc.). Is this a threat to human interdependence, or an inevitable feature?
3) Technology is making the world a lot smaller, and eroding private space and information. Will the ability of people to be in constant contact with each other, and perhaps in constant surveillance of each other, be a good thing or a bad thing? How will this affect human society and culture?
4) Lastly, are we asking these questions too late? Will humans ever be able to control the path of discovery and uses of technology? If not, should we?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Is it morally right to work for a professor when a grad student could be getting a stipend for it?
When photography was invented, Charles Darwin's cousin Frances Galton decided that this new technology could provide the perfect tool for detecting criminal disposition as a genetic trait... (After all, since composite photography progressively blurs out physical differences and leaves only similarities, a composite photo of 100 criminals should produce an image of the typical criminal, right? And if we superimpose the photographs of 100 Jews, then we'll finally get a pure image of The Jew...)
Fast forward to 2003: racial profiling per se may be frowned upon, but that doesn't stop security companies from designing photo-recognition systems that look out for... oh... "traits correlated to terrorism." Security companies, however, don't have to reveal the details of their programs' algorithms to the public since that might supposedly provide terrorists with the knowledge to circumvent those very security detection techniques.
So what's an airport / business / government to do?
Here's a common ethical dilemma to us programmer: A pointy-haired boss (PHB) left unchecked:
1. Allowing projects to start without defined deliverables.
2. Allowing time-and-materials (TMA) projects to run wild with no schedule, since the company will eventually get paid regardless of the outcome.
3. Allowing marketroids to lie to the customers and public about your company's capabilities in the hope these can be acquired on the run if a project is signed with a big enough down payment.
4. Forcing people to keep billing on a project when it is a TMA with a "not to exceed" cost. If the cap is $200,000 and so far you have billed $175,000, you will be forced to find something to keep you busy until you hit the $200K or else.
5. Allowing customers to sign on a project without the buy-in of their technical people. Case in point: In a previous job my company got a huge defense contractor (127,000 desktop users) to sign on an intranet project that required IE 5 or Netscape 6. Small problem: The standard for this monstruous organization is Netscape 4.7, and overseeing the upgrade of 127,000 desktops to Netscape 6 or IE 5 would have cost twice as much as our project's budget. This could have been fixed had these people checked with their IT folks.
My fix was simple: I left. I got to see the company shoot itself in the foot, and went thru layoff rounds every 90 days. The day I was going to be handed over my pink slip I was interviewing across town. That afternoon I was told that I was spared at the last second. 2 days later I got offered the job across town and I jumped ship. I still program but only internally, my customers are my own employers so it is in their best interest to not lie to themselves!
We laid off a lot of good people at that previous company, and most of them by now have better jobs elsewhere. The few that are still working there are living thru pure hell every day of the week.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Some further elaboration on your third point.
3. Will a child be denied equal access to education because they don't have a PC at home?
Your third point has nearly happened already. When my oldest got to 5th or 6th grade, ten years ago, a computer became necessary. Teachers expect kids to be able to type reports, look up information with search engines, use clip art, print out pictures, etc..
Our community has a pretty good library with excellent web access as well. That is also dependent on the affluence of the area, and libraries are probably better equipped in areas where people can already afford their own computers.
This seems to be more an affluence vs. ethics question though.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Here's one that I have yet to figure out for myself:
Should we, as a technological society, share all our creations with other cultures?
As the inventors and producers of various technologies, we are somewhat ready for any given technology (though not always). However, sharing this "progress" with others leads to inevitable imbalance and has a steamroller effect on other cultures and societies.
For example, introduce a given technology in third world country X. This modern wonder saves 2/3 children and extends their lifetime by 30 years (a good thing). The problem is that in order to deal with the ensuing population explosion, progress must be made in terms of food production and other areas (housing, hygene in densly populated areas, waste management, etc. etc.). The obvious solution is to import yet more technology, to cope with these issues. Each of these additions causes their own social upheavals, which must in turn be dealt with...
In the end, you wind up with a duplicate of our own society (you've successfully integrated/eliminated another culture) or a disfunctional mess. The choice becomes "should we let them be (with high mortality, etc) or introduce a trojan horse (that will eventually destroy their culture) in the form of helpful tech?"
Here's one that often comes up in computer security discussions:
DDoS worms, rather than directly attacking other computers from the worm creator's computer, take over other computers and then use them to perform an attack. If you're the one targetted by one of these attacks, do you have the right to defend yourself? Is it right for you to hack into an innocent person's computer because their technological ignorance is actively causing you harm? Would you and the people that depend on your network just having to sit there and accept the attack without any real defense be preferable to that? And if you have the skill to not screw it up (probably a rare skill, but still), would it be right for someone to create an "anti-worm" that deinfects computers that have become unwitting DDoS zombies?
Computer security is a field that is absolutely soaked in real life analogies, but this situation doesn't have one that anyone would ever encounter in their lives. "If a hypnotized/possessed person tried to kill you, would it be moral to hurt them in your self-defense?" isn't an analogy that provokes an instant pre-prepared answer.
I dislike this mentality and I think that it incorrectly identifies the meaning of 'sharing'. Sharing software is perfeclty fine in the same sense of sharing cupcakes. If I have enough cupcakes for the entire class and I give each one a cupcake, that's good. Likewise, if I buy 25 copies of SimCity 4 to hand out to my friends, that's okay too.
Where the issue grows problematical is that the means of reproducing software are far less expensive than the means of reproducing cupcakes. If I already have a computer (which is reasonable, if I own software), then reproducing it costs next to nothing. If I owned a Star Trek replicator and I bought a box of Hostess cupcakes, then replicated them and gave them away, I would have wronged Hostess. I did not come up with the recipe for those cupcakes nor did I do any real work to reproduce them. However, I'm distributing, for free, cupcakes that are identical to Hostess's. Just because I am able to do this does not mean that it is right or ethical for me to do so.
I don't know exactly what one would call the act of distributing, like that, but I certainly don't think it's sharing.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
You know, this post really managed to get me about as mad as any post I have ever seen at /.
I am a student at Penn State University, in the IST program, and I have spent untold amounts of time and my hard earned money to "learn" from instructors who have no idea of what they are even teaching! Maybe if this person doesn't keep up with technology... HE SHOULDN'T BE TEACHING THE DAMN CLASS! Talk about ethics, this post is amazingly frustrating to me.
Doesn't anyone else see the problem here?Students should be learning about this topic from a professor who is schooled in technology and has a good understanding of ethics! Students are now going to be wasting their time in a class where the professor doesn't even know what the prevalent issues are to cover!
College tuitions have skyrocketed, and will continue to do so... however we, as students, continue to receive a rapidly diminishing quality of instruction. My only wish is that no one would help this moron.
www.GamezCore.com For Hardcore PS2 Gamerz : By Hardcore PS2 Gamerz
I was on the help desk of a university. A staff member sent an email to his lover (ie, not his wife). Through a typo, it went to a third person's mailbox. He rang and asked if I could delete the message.
I did. Rationale: the 3rd party hadn't read it, and the putative adulterer's affairs weren't my business. One of my colleagues was adamant that sysadmins should NEVER delete mail from a user mailbox, that it violated that user's privacy, and that the mail after all was correctly addressed.
Ah, the difference between Simon and Simone...
Is it ethical for an American-owned and American-operated company to outsource IT jobs overseas in order to take advantage of lower wages, thereby failing to create jobs stateside for IT workers who demand a higher salary?
This question addresses whether the practice is ethical, rather than symptomatic of a capitalist, employed-at-will society.
I had a class in college that talked about this exact subject. Our text didn't cover a lot of material, but it focused on one big issue: People tend to define themselves by the work that they do. What happens when we have automated all of the work that needs to be done?
While I'm of the opinion that the US was more than justified in using the atomic bomb on Japan (twice, even), I want to play devil's advocate.
"I'm sorry, there is nothing innocent about supporting a regime..."
Who voted for Hideki Tojo?
"The true innocent victims were the American sailors who were bombed in Pearl Harbor by the same people we were discussing peace treaties with."
1.) From the Japanese POV, Pearl Harbor was a cold war gone hot. US trade embargos (especially on oil) were strangling the Japanese war effort (whether the Japanese war effort was moral is a completely different story), not to mention indirect and direct assistance the US was providing Chiang Kai-Shek's government. What do you think the Japanese diplomats were discussing with the US in Washington, tea parties?
2.) A war declaration was supposed to be delivered just before the Pearl Harbor attacks.
Though there was a strong case for the basis of characters, species, and episodes, I think the case was very weak for saying that any particular series (or much less the franchise) was based on any one particular philosophy or philosopher.
Anyway, at least one person agrees with me:
(A review from the Amazon link above)
Warning, it is about ethical theory, and not about modern issues (ie. abortion, religion, homosexuality, etc.) If this is what you are looking for, then you will be pleased, but if you're looking for a book about ethics and modern problems (which I probably was) then you may be a bit disappointed.
Suppose a discovery were made that was too powerful for anyone to be trusted with; for example, the ability to see anything, anywhere. Suppose also that anyone with a good understanding of modern physics was capable of rediscovering this phenomenon. If the government was able to supress the initial discovery, what should they do? Should they work towards eliminating physics from college curriculum? Should they eliminate higher education all together? Would they be justified in killing those scientists who currently know enough to discover it on their own?
How about the "Should Slashdot cache articles?" Is it more ethical to mirror a website without permission, or to send a ton of traffic to their site costing them money?
--nw
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
The gist of the case is a man who murdered a child, imitating a child porn site. The site did not produce genuine children, but of-age models plus age-reducing software, and advertised with spam.
The delimas:
First, I was taught: Ethic is "The rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession." Ethical behavior among salesmen means everything is accepted and promised. Moral is "Of or concerned with the judgment of the goodness or badness of human action and character."
You discover a flaw in your company's software that makes all data suspect. Your customer asks you about the accuracy of your software.
You chair a project. The boss orders that one particular brand of computer be used; however, it cannot do the job.
You discover your boss stealing from the company.
You discover your boss giving your compan's source code to your primary competitor.
You have unlocked the boss's desk and you are rifling through the boss's papers when you discover your boss is stealing.
Your company's primary competition accidentally leaves their source code in a meeting room.
Your customer contracts for you to do a project. You are progressing well. You discover several areas where the hardware and software could make significant, uncontracted improvements to the project. You visit the client. You observe that the client needs the improvements.
You are playing with some new tech in the lab. Your use of the new tech is on the fringes of legality. Using the new tech 'illegally,' you accidentally discover that someone is seriously breaking the law.
The law says you cannot make diagnoses. You use a new technique and discover the patient is seriously ill. The patient visits the doctor and is not told that they are ill.
You use someone's idea abd build upon it resulting in a new technology. The someone doesn't know. The boss doesn't know that the someone exists.
You log onto the customer's computer to update some files. You check the computer log. You discover that the customer hasn't even used the computer, recently. The customer's boss calls you and rips you a new one that your product is broken.
You have a job and you pay income tax. You are uncertain about your company's new corporate partner. Your state law states that taping conversations is illegal. You decide to make tape recordings of every conversation anyway. The corporate partner boasts that they are stealing from your company and stealing from the government to the tune of millions of dollars every year.
Your company develops a better product. The Federal Government needs your product because they are using technology that is 20 years old and inefficient and expensive and such. You approach the Federal Government with your new product. Since the Federal Government didn't develop the product, the Federal Government determines that your product is bad and NO ONE should buy it.
You are working for a DoD contractor which is bought by another contractor. The new contractor-boss decides to perform contrary to the DoD contract. This action will degrade DoD forces and possibly cost lives.
An arrogant branch of the Federal Government will neither give nor sell a piece of software that your customer wants. You have a copy of the software.
You develop a product that can be used to protect the good guys; however, it can also be used, illegaly, to protect the bad guys.
Great. I made myself sick reliving my Beltway Bandit days.
Now, blacklisting isn't a new idea, and it doesn't require technology. But it also does... blacklisting, to be effective, is a bureaucratic process. Bureaucracy is very much enabled by technology, since the abacus on up. A large amount of technology continues to be used for bureaucracy (probably a considerable majority of computer technology).
Bureaucracy isn't all bad... we often don't notice all the effective bureaucracy around us.
And what's the moral for database manufacturers who are creating something that happens to be used for immoral purposes? I don't know, but I will argue strongly that they are not entirely without culpability. The greatest evils ever done were done by people who did not feel themselves responsible, supported by people who did not feel themselves responsible. I believe the ends justify the means, but I also believe the ends can be a condemnation of the means, no matter how benign or neutral they seemed at the time. Anyway, certainly a point for discussion.
A very good book on the moral implications of technology is The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. It's not about engineering particularly, but about technology (and a reaction against anti-technologists), building infrastructure, and very much about the moral responsibilities and questions of being someone who designs and builds the things that surround us, without being able to make many key decisions about those things. It applies very well to computer programmers.
The decision to drop the bomb on the Japanese was made because, under the Japanese political system, there was no way for them to surrender. This was an unnacceptable outcome, a disgrace to the Emperor. The most important thing in the world to them was that the Emperor not lose face. The Japanese had held back close to one third of their forces for defense of mainland Japan, with the intent of fighting a long, bloody, and drawn out war against Americans that would have lasted years and killed millions. The casualties and horror of that war would have made Hiroshima look like a minor traffic accident. The Japanese wanted to force a stalemate--and avoid surrender--at ANY cost. The Allies just wanted to go home. But to go home, you need unconditional surrender...otherwise, you've won only the first round, not the war.
So they dropped two nukes, bang bang, to make it look like they had a stockpile of them and this was the beginning of the end, in which all Japan would be reduced to a scorched smoking ruin. They only had the two, but the Japanese didn't know that, and couldn't know that. The prospect was unthinkable, and so the Emperor was forced to do the unthinkable to prevent it: surrender.
We make the mistake of believing that everyone thinks like we do, that all cultures are essentially like ours. They aren't. I doubt that even the Japanese today can grasp how single minded the people of Imperial Japan were. Living in a pluralistic democracy, we certainly cannot grasp it. The stories of kamikaze pilots and hermit soldiers who waited 15 years after the war for orders that never came are all true.
IE: cracking, (as opposed to hacking) picking locks, how to pick pocket, building bombs...
Knowing how people go about cracking into systems could be harmful if one does it and it could be useful when building a defence for said crackers.
When you learn how to pick locks, you gain an understanding of what makes a good lock and what doesn't. Nice to know when buying locks...
Pick pocket? Walking through the airport and get bumped? No big deal right? Unless you know how these people work.
Building bombs? Surely this is a terrorist only thing right? How about knowing what is a bomb and what is not? What if you are in a position to disarm one?
Crypto. Same as locks really. How does one know what is going to be effective and what is not? The DVD guys sure didn't. (Heh Heh) For that matter, using the crypto knowledge to solve a simple problem like playing the DVD under Linux? Legal? Not in many places. Moral and ethical. I would say yes, provided you own the thing and have a clear right to use it.
So is the knowledge itself bad? What about the teaching and access? Should everyone be able to know and decide for themselves or not?
Each of these things is under attack right now. Why?
Blogging because I can...
I've recently written an academic paper on ethical issues as they relate to systems designed to support decision makers. Whilst this may be a bit academic, or even specific, for your purposes, it does provide a high level overview of some of the main issues related to ethics and information technology. You can grab a pdf copy here.
I really hate it when people say this. Production/reward systems are not human nature, they are social constructs. If we go back into the not-so-far past, human nature was plucking fruit off of trees and gathering nuts and grubs. The reward systems you are talking about only became "human nature" when people started locking the food up and needed to explain why it had to be that way. A gazillion screaming linux contributors would disagree with your idea of human nature, and it's dependence on the carrot and the stick.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
An introductary course should not focus on particular technological issues, but rather on:
The actual technology is secondary, and the person faced with the ethical dilemma will probably know more about the technology than you anyways.
Off the top of my head, I would present the following, incomplete, list of dilemma categories (An exercise for the class would be to have the students come up with the list themselves, perhaps starting with examples taken from the press and movies):
One presumes the goal of the course is to encourge ethical behaviour and decisions, rather than recognizing ethical dilemmas and using public relations to justify the use of the most cost-effective solution, regardless of the moral issues.
With that in mind the following meta-issues should be discussed:
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
I think that technology is a rather amoral/aphilosophical topic. Having said that, technology is very good at testing your moral/philosophical standing, by obscuring very basic issues like:
1) What is information?
2) What is property?
3) What is ownership?
Good answers to these questions will require no modification, no matter how technology advances. Bad answers (like the US government's answers) are dated, because they are based on a concept (specifically, ownership of material things) which can grow obsolete, as technology marches on.
Just a recommendation to keep in mind.
> will be teaching a college class on the topic
> of ethical dilemmas brought about by new
> technology. Unfortunately, he doesn't keep up
> with technology news
No offense intended to your relative.
This is the biggest gripe I have today about our education system. The people teaching it are not in the real world at all. They live in their world obivious to life as the rest of the world experiences it.
My ex-mother-in-law took a C++ class taught by an accounting professor. In home work assigments, he would provide base classes that the class had to use in their assigments. However, the base classes had syntax errors or were not really bases etc....it was terrible.
I took an Engineering Ethics class when I was working on my undergrad at Auburn (War Eagle!). Anyway, I remember one particular anecdote quite well. The professor wasked the class, "Would you say air bags in cars are good or bad?" Most of the students agreed that they were good. In fact, they have saved thousands (millions??) of lives. No question about it. However, it turns out that the average cost for hospitalization has increased during the same time frame (not just inflation--they realy have gone up). It seems that for accidents where people were usually killed (pre-air bags), the lower body injuries have become what are keeping people in the hospital. And more people are having life-long paralysis as a result of those accidents. Now, most would still agree that being alive is still better, but it turned out that there was another side to the coin that probably wasn't completely thought out.
Have fun with your class.
There is an old 'where are your beliefs?' question that helps you figure out what you think government should be like. The question (paraphrased) is: If you could place the people in the top 100 positions of government from the following two choices, which would it be? A) The top 100 graduates from Harvard University, -or- B) The first 100 people in the phone book? The point to think about is: which bias you prefer? Do you want people from a select class, with obvious advantages, but perhaps some myopia with respect to the real world; or, a bunch of people from all walks of life, some of which will be just like you? Do you want to be governed by The Elite or The Average Joe?
So what is the /. crowd is made up of?
I think with /. you get a little of best of both worlds. You get the focus of a tech-savvy community, without the exclusionary elements. Better yet, the Average Joe gets moderator points.
Sure, the professor could have thrown the question out on Usenet. Or, the professor could have only regurgitated what his peers in the education industry are saying. Heck, he could have done both at the same time by consulting the Internet Oracle ;-)
I think too, that the timing of the question is significant. It isn't like classes begin next week. Chances are, this professor is preparing for a class for the summer or fall semester. That does show some forsight, and real interest being able to present quality material.
So if I were in a position of looking for the technology + moral questions of the day, I think I could do a lot worse than /.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"