Computer science faces an ethics crisis. The Cambridge Analytica scandal proves it. - The Boston Globe

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dave Farber <farber () gmail com>
> Date: March 23, 2018 at 7:11:31 AM EDT
> To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: Computer science faces an ethics crisis. The Cambridge Analytica scandal proves it. - The Boston Globe
>
>
> https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2018/03/22/computer-science-faces-ethics-crisis-the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-proves/IzaXxl2BsYBtwM4nxezgcP/story.html
>
> Computer science faces an ethics crisis. The Cambridge Analytica scandal proves it.
> March 22, 2018
>
> NEW YORK TIMES
> Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg speaks at a conference in San Jose, Calif., in 2017. Cambridge Analytica scraped up 
> Facebook data from more than 50 million people.
> Cambridge Analytica built a weapon. They did so understanding what uses its buyers had for it, and it worked exactly 
> as intended. To help clients manipulate voters, the company built psychological profiles from data that it 
> surreptitiously harvested from the accounts of 50 million Facebook users. But what Cambridge Analytica did was hardly 
> unique or unusual in recent years: a week rarely goes by when some part of the Internet, working as intended, doesn’t 
> cause appreciable harm.
>
> I didn’t come up in computer science; I began my career as a physicist. That transition gave me a specific 
> perspective on this situation. That the field of computer science, unlike other sciences, has not yet faced serious 
> negative consequences for the work its practitioners do.
>
> Chemistry had its first reckoning with dynamite; horror at its consequences led its inventor, Alfred Nobel, to give 
> his fortune to the prize that bears his name. Only a few years later, its second reckoning began when chemist Clara 
> Immerwahr committed suicide the night before her husband and fellow chemist, Fritz Haber, went to stage the first 
> poison gas attack on the Eastern Front. Physics had its reckoning when nuclear bombs destroyed Hiroshima and 
> Nagasaki, and so many physicists became political activists — some for arms control, some for weapons development. 
> Human biology had eugenics. Medicine had Tuskegee and thalidomide. Civil engineering, a series of building, bridge, 
> and dam collapses. (My thanks to many Twitter readers for these examples)
>
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>
> These events profoundly changed their respective fields, and the way people come up in them. Before these crises, 
> each field was dominated by visions of how it could make the world a better place. New dyes, new materials, new 
> sources of energy, new modes of transport — everyone could see the beauty. Afterward, everyone became painfully aware 
> of how their work could be turned against their dreams.
>
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> Michael A. Cohen tekes on the absurdities and hypocrisies of the current political moment.
> Each field dealt with its reckoning in its own way. Physics and chemistry rarely teach dedicated courses on ethics, 
> but the discussion is woven into every aspect of daily life, from the first days of one’s education. As a graduate 
> student, one of the two professors I was closest to would share stories of the House Un-American Activities Committee 
> and the anti-war movement; the other would talk obliquely about his classified work on nuclear weapons. Engineering, 
> like medicine, developed codes of ethics and systems of licensure. Human biology, like psychology, developed strong 
> institutional review boards and processes.
>
> None of these processes, of course, prevent all ethical lapses, and they neither require nor create agreement about 
> which choices are right. Many physicists, for example, began avoiding working on problems with military applications 
> in the years after the McCarthy hearings and the Vietnam War. But many others do such research, and the issue is 
> frequently and hotly debated.
>
> Computer science is a field of engineering. Its purpose is to build systems to be used by others. But even though it 
> has had its share of events which could have prompted a deeper reckoning — from the Therac-25 accidents, in which 
> misprogrammed radiation therapy machines killed three people, up to IBM’s role in the Holocaust — and even though the 
> things it builds are becoming as central to our lives as roads and bridges, computer science has not yet come to 
> terms with the responsibility that comes with building things which so profoundly affect people’s lives.
>
> Software engineers continue to treat safety and ethics as specialities, rather than the foundations of all design; 
> young engineers believe they just need to learn to code, change the world, disrupt something. Business leaders focus 
> on getting a product out fast, confident that they will not be held to account if that product fails 
> catastrophically. Simultaneously imagining their products as changing the world and not being important enough to 
> require safety precautions, they behave like kids in a shop full of loaded AK-47’s.
>
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>
> * * *
>
> What would a higher standard of care look like? First of all, safety would be treated as a principal concern at all 
> stages, even when “just trying to get something out the door,” and engineers’ education would equip them to do so. If 
> safety came first, the Facebook Graph API used by Cambridge Analytica, which raised widespread alarm among engineers 
> from the moment it first launched in 2010, would likely never have seen the light of day.
>
> Tech companies focus intensely on preventing crashes. A rigorous effort to anticipate what could go wrong is already 
> standard practice for specialists in system reliability, which deals with “what-ifs” around computer failures. A 
> higher standard for safety would simply do the same for “what-ifs” around human consequences. This would not imply 
> that all systems should be built to the same safety standards; nobody expects a tent to be built like a skyscraper. 
> But the civil engineer’s approach would require a substantial shift of priorities.
>
> Such a shift would sometimes be resisted for business reasons, but working codes of ethics give engineers (and 
> others) more power to say “no.” If breaking ethics rules would mean the end of someone’s career, an employer couldn’t 
> easily replace someone who refuses to cheat. If the systems for enforcement are well-built, a competitor couldn’t 
> easily work around those standards. Uniform codes of ethics give engineers more of a voice in protecting the public.
>
> Underpinning all of these need to be systems for deciding on what computer science ethics should be, and how they 
> should be enforced. These will need to be built by a consensus among the stakeholders in the field, from industry, to 
> academia, to capital, and most importantly, among the engineers and the public, who are ultimately most affected. It 
> must be done with particular attention to diversity of representation. In computer science, more than any other 
> field, system failures tend to affect people in different social contexts (race, gender, class, geography, 
> disability) differently. Familiarity with the details of real life in these different contexts is required to prevent 
> disaster.
>
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>
> There are many methods by which different fields enforce their ethics, from the institutional review boards that 
> screen life-sciences experiments on humans and animals, to the mid-career certification of professional engineers who 
> then oversee projects used by the unsuspecting public, to the across-the-board licensure of doctors and lawyers. Each 
> of these approaches has advantages, and computer science would need to combine ideas and innovate on them to build 
> something suited to its specific needs. What would not be acceptable is the consequence of inaction. The public would 
> lose trust in technology, and computer scientists would face a host of practical, commercial, and regulatory 
> consequences.
>
> Computers have made having friends on the other side of the world as normal as having them next door, have put the 
> sum of human knowledge in our pockets, and have made nearly every object we encounter more reliable and less 
> expensive. Yet their failure, whether by accident or by unthinking design, can have catastrophic consequences for 
> individuals and society alike.
>
> What stands between these is attention to the core questions of engineering: to what uses might a system be put? How 
> might it fail? And how will it behave when it does? Computer science must step up to the bar set by its sister 
> fields, before its own bridge collapse — or worse, its own Hiroshima.
>
> Yonatan Zunger, now at the startup Humu, is a former distinguished engineer in security and privacy at Google. Follow 
> him on Twitter @yonatanzunger.
> Continue Reading



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