reading notes for code fellows
It is important that you consider the ethics of anything you are creating, as you are the last line of defense between the program you have been assigned to create and the general public in a world where things like AI are becoming more and more ingrained in our society. As an employee of a company, you should make your voice heard if you believe something is unethical, because they are more likely to listen to you than public dissent, and sometimes that can make a difference. When building powerful technology, you have a responsibility to ensure it is used for good and not for harm.
A more real and in-your-face question lies in the ethics of the programming in self-driving cars. When a human is driving, we can’t predict what their split second decision will be in a life or death situation, but we need to program exactly what the car will do, up to and including deciding who is most likely to die in any situation. With other issues like data collection, now that it is far easier to collect data, companies don’t need to decide exactly what they want anymore, and that allows them to take everything and decide on a use for it later, which is a dangerous way to look at data. In the past, data about things like ethnicity or even areas someone spends time have been used to discriminate againt them in the form of ‘personalization’.
At google, their principles of AI have been presented as the need to be socially beneficial, avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias, be built and tested for safety, be accountable to people, incorporate privacy design principles, uphold high standards of scientific excellence, and be made available for uses that accord with their principles. They also state that they will not pursue AI projects that will cause overall harm, be used as a weapon, be used as surveillance, or go against human rights. I do find it strange that only months following this set of guidelines is when the earlier article about google working on a censored search engine for China came out. Even with strict guidelines that are meant to keep a company and its employees on the right track in terms of ethics, there are still projects that will do their best to slip through the cracks, and you should always stay vigilant in what is and is not ethical, regardless of whether the company believes it is within the policy.
It is important to have a solid code of ethics going into the tech world, and even then you’re going to have that pushed at, and sometimes you’ll need to make decisions that you wouldn’t have in any other case. That’s why it is important to be as informed as possible about the true ethics of anything you are working on.