Computer Ethics @ComputerEthics@mastodon.technology
Stories, articles and news about the ethics of software development.
AI Ethics researcher fired from Google.
“Gebru, an alumni of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is one of the leading voices in the ethical use of artificial intelligence. She is well-known for her work on a landmark study in 2018 that showed how facial recognition software misidentified dark-skinned women as much as 35% of the time, whereas the technology worked with near precision on white men.”
https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical
Update: Microsoft says they will remove individual reports, and leave only organization-wide statistics.
Turns out public backslashes do work.
Twelve weeks of lessons about teaching tech workers to organize inside their companies.
Attendance is limited to 20 persons – but they say all teaching material will be made public.
Microsoft Office 365 now enables creepy workers surveillance, with individual "Productivity" dashboards.
The proposed Hippocratic Oath for AI developers:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/14/a-hippocratic-oath-for-artificial-intelligence-practitioners/
Microsoft President, Brad Smith: Why We Urgently Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
“In the top 10 Computer Science departments in the nation, there is only one that requires taking an ethics course to graduate. Ethics is a field that will have to get infused into Computer Science education. There should be a stand-alone course called Ethics for AI that every computer science major must take.”
IBM ends all facial recognition work as CEO calls out bias and inequality.
Software engineer publicly resigns from #Facebook in protest over the social network's “propagation of weaponized hatred”.
This comes less than one month after Tim Bray left #Amazon over firing of whistleblowers.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timothy-j-aveni_blacklivesmatter-activity-6673316720993824768-q_dU
Twitter starts enforcing its terms on service even on Donald Trump tweets.
The Parable of the Locksmith – A Six-Month Retrospective on Ethical Open Source.
“‘I want to hire you to open a certain safe. Never mind whose safe it is—that’s none of your concern. Just do the job I hire you to do, and I will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.’”
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/a-six-month-retrospective-on-ethical-open-source
Tim Bray also wrote some words after the reactions of the previous days.
“- Can we get on the phone so I can ask you some questions?
Hmm, I'm not that interesting, just a grumpy old one-percenter white-guy engineer with a social media presence. If you want to go live with this story you should do it with the actual people who got fired, who are young, fresh-faced, passionate, and really at the center of the news story.”
Tim Bray, who wrote the XML and JSON specs, leaves #Amazon over firing of whistleblowers.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon
@edri published #EthicalWebDev, a guide for ethical website development and maintenance. It has been a huge collective work for more than a year by a bunch of wonderful contributors.
You can find the PDF version here: https://edri.org/files/ethical_web_dev_web.pdf
EDRi wrote a blogpost about it in the EDRigram newsletter: https://edri.org/ethical-web-dev/
<3
via @bob, who also links to the follow-up discussion with many more examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692005
The code I’m still ashamed of – Bill Sourour
“If you write code for a living, there’s a chance that at some point in your career, someone will ask you to code something a little deceitful – if not outright unethical.”
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-code-im-still-ashamed-of-e4c021dff55e/
Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract
“In an open letter published Wednesday on GitHub, software developers representing the open source community joined the call for GitHub to immediately cancel the $200,000 contract with ICE.”
“The Holberton-Turing Oath is made to gather all AI experts in the world around shared values and moral to drive them to use their skills by insuring their integrity and by avoiding any threat to any life being.”
“Vice reports at least five staffers quit today.
(…)
Last month, GitHub staff engineer Sophie Haskins resigned, stating she was leaving because the company did not cancel its contract with ICE.”
Stories, articles and news about the ethics of software development.
