[HN Gopher] Integrating social responsibility into core CS ___________________________________________________________________ Integrating social responsibility into core CS Author : luu Score : 9 points Date : 2023-05-16 03:18 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (evanpeck.github.io) (TXT) w3m dump (evanpeck.github.io) | diebeforei485 wrote: | It's important that this sort of thing stick to general | principles and not pander to the popular topics of the day. | turtleyacht wrote: | Is there room for education on when things go south? | | Effective Whistleblowing | | Privacy-Preserving Patterns | | Ethical SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs | | Ethical SRE in the Time of AI | | Core Protest Principles | | Nonviolent Resistance | | Change from Within: Studies in Commerce | | Fundamentally, even if we know it to be wrong, and a market | exists for it, what is the game-theoretic, optimal strategy? What | is the ethical choice? | cxr wrote: | Social responsibility is about more than newly mainstream DEI | programs. ACM and IEEE have promulgated professional codes of | ethics for a while. Social responsibility can involve questions | about everything from adding a stored payment option (credit card | numbers) on a POS terminal that you know will be deployed with no | protections to saying "no" when a client that's an insurance | carrier says they want their self-service online claims system to | refuse to accept a submission unless a checkbox is ticked that | explicitly opts the submitter in to forms of correspondence that | work to the submitter's disadvantage (e.g. non-written), | including overriding what preferences/demands they've | communicated to the carrier in the past. I think every course I | took that was offered under the umbrella of the college of | engineering at my school had a mandate that the instructor spend | one week (2-3 classes) out of the semester on professional | ethics. And this wasn't recently. | | Related: this month's issue of Communications of the ACM also has | an obvious focus. <https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/5> | askvictor wrote: | It would be nice if there were some sort of industry protection | for engineers who do refuse unethical tasks. At present, I'd | expect you'd get fired pretty quickly if you said no (at a lot | of companies). | cxr wrote: | Most "software engineers" don't have licenses/credentials | backing up their job title, anyway. Compared to other | industries, it's lightly regulated at best. So long as that's | the case, I think the current balance, which includes the | possibility that a programmer will be dismissed for failure | to comply, is reasonable. From an HR and PR standpoint, | there's also the possibility of blowback following disclosure | that a programmer was fired for using their own judgment on | an ethics question. That's not nothing. | ryandrake wrote: | I'm pretty sure most CS programs don't even have an Ethics | requirement, let alone Social Responsibility. I bet some don't | even offer Ethics as an elective. You can go through an entire | undergrad degree program without even so much as a "Don't use | these powers to hurt / scam people." lesson. | | People come into the workforce thinking that as long as the | technology is interesting and the problem is complex, it's cool | to work on it. We don't seem to care how our work is used. "Your | company is using your application to take advantage of the | elderly..." "Hey, I'm just doing matrix math here, bro." | | I used to ask interview candidates if they've ever worked on (or, | easier to answer: if they've ever known someone who worked on) a | project that raised ethical questions, and Let's dive deeper into | those questions/topics. The number of blank stares I got... like | I had a second head. I don't even ask anymore. | ralusek wrote: | Social responsibility in CS, in my experience, means that if a | given function doesn't produce equal outputs for two given | inputs, all it takes to suggest that the function is biased is an | assertion that the outputs _should_ have been the same if the | function _weren 't_ biased. How different the inputs were, even | along the criteria that the function actually uses in order to | produce its output, is completely irrelevant. | poorbutdebtfree wrote: | Leave DIE to the humanities and arts majors please. | MattRix wrote: | Why? It seems like something more CS students could learn | about. | mattanimal wrote: | [dead] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-05-17 23:00 UTC)