An Ethical Crisis in Computing?
Computer scientists think often of «Ender’s Game» these days. In this award-winning 1985 science-fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, Ender is being trained at Battle School, an institution designed to make young children into military commanders against an unspecified enemy. Ender’s team engages in a series of computer-simulated battles, eventually destroying the enemy’s planet, only to learn then that the battles were very real and a real planet has been destroyed.
Many of us got involved in computing because programming was fun. The benefits of computing seemed intuitive to us. We truly believe that computing yields tremendous societal benefits; for example, the life-saving potential of driverless cars is enormous! Like Ender, however, we realized recently that computing is not a game–it is real–and it brings with it not only societal benefits, but also significant societal costs, such as labor polarization, disinformation, and smart-phone addiction.
The common reaction to this crisis is to label it as an «ethical crisis» and the proposed response is to add courses in ethics to the academic computing curriculum. I will argue that the ethical lens is too narrow. The real issue is how to deal with technology’s impact on society. Technology is driving the future, but who is doing the steering?
[Slides]
- Séries:
- Microsoft Research Talks
- Date:
- Haut-parleurs:
- Eric Horvitz, Moshe Y. Vardi
- Affiliation:
- Microsoft Research, Rice University
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Emre Kiciman
Senior Principal Research Manager
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Eric Horvitz
Chief Scientific Officer
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Taille: Microsoft Research Talks
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Decoding the Human Brain – A Neurosurgeon’s Experience
Speakers:- Pascal Zinn,
- Ivan Tashev
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Galea: The Bridge Between Mixed Reality and Neurotechnology
Speakers:- Eva Esteban,
- Conor Russomanno
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Current and Future Application of BCIs
Speakers:- Christoph Guger
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Challenges in Evolving a Successful Database Product (SQL Server) to a Cloud Service (SQL Azure)
Speakers:- Hanuma Kodavalla,
- Phil Bernstein
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Improving text prediction accuracy using neurophysiology
Speakers:- Sophia Mehdizadeh
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DIABLo: a Deep Individual-Agnostic Binaural Localizer
Speakers:- Shoken Kaneko
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Recent Efforts Towards Efficient And Scalable Neural Waveform Coding
Speakers:- Kai Zhen
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Audio-based Toxic Language Detection
Speakers:- Midia Yousefi
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From SqueezeNet to SqueezeBERT: Developing Efficient Deep Neural Networks
Speakers:- Sujeeth Bharadwaj
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Hope Speech and Help Speech: Surfacing Positivity Amidst Hate
Speakers:- Monojit Choudhury
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'F' to 'A' on the N.Y. Regents Science Exams: An Overview of the Aristo Project
Speakers:- Peter Clark
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Checkpointing the Un-checkpointable: the Split-Process Approach for MPI and Formal Verification
Speakers:- Gene Cooperman
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Learning Structured Models for Safe Robot Control
Speakers:- Ashish Kapoor
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