If Ethics is not None

• Katharine Jarmul (http://kjamistan.com/)

• IBM ad about Sage system.
• Norbert Wiener and his quote about computers as new slave labour.
• We automate jobs away -- are we responsible for the resulting degradation of life of those workers.
• Joseph Weizenbaum, Elisa. His quote about computer as "fundamentally conservative force" (socially conservative).
• Technological progress sometimes enables continuing existing practice where otherwise social progress would be necessary.
• Ole-Johan Dahl, Simula, work with Norvegian worker unions. Build stuff that allows people to influence their fate and stuff.
• Do we build technical stuff that works against our politics? If so, why do we do that?
• Andrey Ershov - education, computer literacy, make at art of computer programming public property!
• BBN, ARPAnet:
  • Bob Kahn - Strategic Computing Initiative, bla bla AI stuff to "increase our national security and economic stength"
  • Severo Ornstein - Computer professionals for social responsibility
• Karen Spärk Jones - NLP research, TFIDF, critic of gender disparity in computing - don't leave it to others to make the computing-related decisions
• Joanna Bryson - AI Ethics, "Our personal data should be like our houses"
• Are we all working on a modern version of a Manhattan Project?

• Who is responsible?
• How do we hold one another accountable?

Follow up session

General strategy

• Issues that we want to address:
  • How technology shapes society.
  • Users trust that technology works right.
  • Business models around software are not always ethical.
  • We don't always know where we are standing it terms of societal change.
    • "Facebook is practically dead"
  • Privacy, data collection, etc.
• Concrete avenues:
  • How do we raise awareness among software developers?
    • e.g. set the right defaults: e.g. https vs http,
  • How do we motivate developers to care.
  • How do we raise awareness among users of software?
  • How do we improve public understanding of technology?
  • How do we help policy makers that have good intentions to make technologically aware decisions.

Next steps

1. Raising awareness among devs
   • Research on what already exists, existing organisations that work on this or close to it
   • List of resources, organisations that can provide information,
   • Create a website (or work with other orgs to create it)
   • Cooperate with existing organisations that are already doing it:
     • CCC
     • EFF
     • FSF
     • Fight for the Future
     • Effective Altruism
2. Motivation and inspiration
   • Carrots:
     • Success stories of ethical choices
     • Show respected people who care about these issues
   • Sticks:
     • Show consequences of not thinking about ethics, unethical behaviour
3. Coordination
   • Involve more people
   • Show them easy actionable ways to contribute
4. Raise awareness of ethical issues related to technology among general public / improve public understanding of technology
   • Make a curriculum and make it available to people who would use it to educate others.
   • Website? but who will read it. How do we reach people?
     • Scary stories
     • Jokes, pictures, basically we need to engage their emotions, logic won't really work.
     • Short explanatory videos (but we'll need comms-savvy people to do it)
   • Give users better options and inform them about existing ones:
     • People like EFF are working on it, maybe more efficient to work with them
   • Education, especially children
5. Implementing specific solutions for concrete problems (e.g. privacy, free software)

Other stuff

• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (the novel),
• Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge.