Following up and expanding on our previous post ‘How to Deal with the Conundrum of Smart or Safe Cities‘, let’s expand about the issue of ethics in technology. This excellent post Medium post by Rachel Coldicutt ‘Ethics won’t make software engineering better‘ addresses some of the core issues: more ethics trainings for engineers won’t by itself address the issue.
She explains, “Ensuring more computer scientists have a rudimentary understanding of ethical decision-making will certainly broaden their horizons as individuals, but it’s not enough to transform how technology is made or how it affects society. A more radical proposal is to train arts and social science graduates in product and experience design, so that people who put people first have the skills to shape technology more confidently.”
Her point here is that even ethical computer scientists may fail without a proper ethical governance. And this governance must foster multi-disciplinary-based decisions. She fosters the presence of social science experts as part of the teams.
Whether this is only what is needed is debatable, but the point that ethics must be considered from a diverse viewpoint is essential, inasmuch as it is well known that computer engineering has a gender and ethnical bias, which needs to be checked. It is why governance and authorities must be diverse and not only engineering-centered.
In summary, Rachel Coldicutt states “Knowing what to do with tech must become at least as valuable a skill as knowing how to make it.“
