Weekly Journal : Ethics in the News

We suggest that engineering should be viewed as an experimental process. It is not, of course, an experiment conducted solely in a laboratory under controlled conditions. Rather, it is an experiment on a social scale involving human subjects. — Mike Martin and Roland Schinzinger

Submitting Your Work

Submit a Markdown formatted plain text file, named week13_ethics_news.md, to the journal folder of your individual portfolio_NETID repository provided for you in the course's Gitlab group.

Specification

One look these days at the news headlines should make it clear that ethical issues abound in tech companies or how technology and software are applied (such as data privacy, algorithmic bias, algorithmic payment transparency, right to repair, or validity of scientific results). Our programming languages can touch on ethical issues due to security issues, vulnerabilities created by allowing control characters in comments, or Unicode encoding in String literals. It is also important to pay attention to what information is stored in public GIT repositories and the disastrous results.

Issues due to technical innovations are incredibly challenging because typical processes do not constrain them, so they can often outpace our capacity to think through all possible impacts. However, there is significant evidence that the main themes in today's issues have been contemplated previously and may even be timeless. For example, many concerns about smartphones were raised by the original telephone as well as the telegraph.

Use this journal entry to explore a topic of interest, deep knowledge, or personal experience and develop a personal ethical position based on one or more documented examples, such as:

• Current event or news stories
• Technical innovation
• Company culture, decision, or action
• Uncommon "evil" use(s) of common technology
• Controversial technological subject
• Lived event relating to a technical project you have worked on

Write about your interest by thinking critically about it from multiple perspectives to justify an ethical perspective. Do not simply summarize an existing perspective or report just the facts, but rather work to understand the depth and ambiguity of the ethical issues in the topic and develop your own thoughts and feelings by seeing how they might impact your plans for the future (e.g., what company you want to work for, what kind of software you want to develop, etc.).

Your analyses should address both positive and negative possible outcomes to show your understanding of why someone thought it was a good idea to try despite obvious or unintended ethical concerns. If possible, find connections to historical events or sentiments that show previous thoughts about these types of concerns.

Provide links to at least four resources you used to develop your opinion about the topic from an ethical perspective.