Prepare a 250 word reflection on ethical issues and technology. What do you see are the major themes that emerge from the videos by Kundu, Fox, and Robocalyse.
Prepare a 250 word reflection on ethical issues and technology. What do you see are the major themes that emerge from the videos by Kundu, Fox, and Robocalyse.
View themes and issues through the lenses of prescriiptive and psychological approaches to ethical decision making Examine the parallels in the issues raised so far in our course and by the speakers in the videos.
Did any of the content go against any of your values?
The many-faceted academic discipline of computer science has provided us with powerful ways to describe, specify, and understand the limits of processes and data. Computing, a more encompassing concept, is an area of study and practice addressing the broader milieu of the computer. Because computing is now so pervasive, there are numerous perspectives on what computing is: for instance, some people focus on theoretical underpinnings, others on implementation, others still on social or environmental impacts. These perspectives are unified by shared characteristics, including some less commonly noted: computing can involve great beauty and creativity.
Computing often enforces a kind of crystalline beauty because of its precision. Yet, the beauty of computing can also exhibit the imperfection, entropy, and ambiguity of the physical world: Software may contain flaws, and hardware invariably degrades. Computing also involves creativity, in part because it involves choices about how to express procedures and data: for instance, prioritizing efficiency or impact on societal challenges.
It is particularly valuable to reflect upon the nature of computing now because we are on the cusp of the formation of a College of Computing at MIT, the grandest restructuring of the Institute in decades.
At MIT, computing has had impacts that cut across all five schools and our many departments, labs, and centers, each with numerous stakeholders who view computing differently. In practice, therefore, computing is defined in different ways by different ecologies of people, practices, and even artifacts.
For instance, an outcome deemed an artificial intelligence (AI) system might involve computers, teams of researchers and developers, users, technical reports, software, and writings in conference proceedings, social media, and more, all of which are interconnected.
Consider, for example, the famous chatbot Eliza, which used simple text manipulation to simulate a conversation with a psychotherapist. Eliza has sometimes been described as an AI system for reasons outside of its technical complexity and without reference to the original publication – much to the chagrin of its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum.
Weizenbaum’s aim in creating Eliza was not to show that such a program was “intelligent,” and hence an AI system, but rather to show a clever approach to text manipulation and (later) to consider how this revealed something about the psychological traits of humans.
As MIT’s College of Computing moves forward, it will be important to remember how dynamic our conceptions of what is central or peripheral to computing and areas such as AI are, based on the passage of time and the changing of communities.
A dream for the future
Given how broad an endeavor computing is, it follows that it holds great power to both ameliorate and exacerbate social and ethical challenges. I would like to zoom in on just one such challenge before reflecting on the future of computing at MIT.
Computing has long been intertwined with society’s dreams of the future. I have argued that one of our society’s dreams could be called the “Avatar Dream,” a culturally shared vision of a future in which, through the computer, people can become whoever or whatever they wish to be. [Adapted from: D. Fox Harrell and Chong-U Lim. 2017. Reimagining the avatar dream: modeling social identity in digital media. Communications of the ACM 60, 7 (July 2017), 50-61. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3098342.]