[HN Gopher] Integrating social responsibility into core CS
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       Integrating social responsibility into core CS
        
       Author : luu
       Score  : 9 points
       Date   : 2023-05-16 03:18 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (evanpeck.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (evanpeck.github.io)
        
       | diebeforei485 wrote:
       | It's important that this sort of thing stick to general
       | principles and not pander to the popular topics of the day.
        
       | turtleyacht wrote:
       | Is there room for education on when things go south?
       | 
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       | Change from Within: Studies in Commerce
       | 
       | Fundamentally, even if we know it to be wrong, and a market
       | exists for it, what is the game-theoretic, optimal strategy? What
       | is the ethical choice?
        
       | cxr wrote:
       | Social responsibility is about more than newly mainstream DEI
       | programs. ACM and IEEE have promulgated professional codes of
       | ethics for a while. Social responsibility can involve questions
       | about everything from adding a stored payment option (credit card
       | numbers) on a POS terminal that you know will be deployed with no
       | protections to saying "no" when a client that's an insurance
       | carrier says they want their self-service online claims system to
       | refuse to accept a submission unless a checkbox is ticked that
       | explicitly opts the submitter in to forms of correspondence that
       | work to the submitter's disadvantage (e.g. non-written),
       | including overriding what preferences/demands they've
       | communicated to the carrier in the past. I think every course I
       | took that was offered under the umbrella of the college of
       | engineering at my school had a mandate that the instructor spend
       | one week (2-3 classes) out of the semester on professional
       | ethics. And this wasn't recently.
       | 
       | Related: this month's issue of Communications of the ACM also has
       | an obvious focus. <https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/5>
        
         | askvictor wrote:
         | It would be nice if there were some sort of industry protection
         | for engineers who do refuse unethical tasks. At present, I'd
         | expect you'd get fired pretty quickly if you said no (at a lot
         | of companies).
        
           | cxr wrote:
           | Most "software engineers" don't have licenses/credentials
           | backing up their job title, anyway. Compared to other
           | industries, it's lightly regulated at best. So long as that's
           | the case, I think the current balance, which includes the
           | possibility that a programmer will be dismissed for failure
           | to comply, is reasonable. From an HR and PR standpoint,
           | there's also the possibility of blowback following disclosure
           | that a programmer was fired for using their own judgment on
           | an ethics question. That's not nothing.
        
       | ryandrake wrote:
       | I'm pretty sure most CS programs don't even have an Ethics
       | requirement, let alone Social Responsibility. I bet some don't
       | even offer Ethics as an elective. You can go through an entire
       | undergrad degree program without even so much as a "Don't use
       | these powers to hurt / scam people." lesson.
       | 
       | People come into the workforce thinking that as long as the
       | technology is interesting and the problem is complex, it's cool
       | to work on it. We don't seem to care how our work is used. "Your
       | company is using your application to take advantage of the
       | elderly..." "Hey, I'm just doing matrix math here, bro."
       | 
       | I used to ask interview candidates if they've ever worked on (or,
       | easier to answer: if they've ever known someone who worked on) a
       | project that raised ethical questions, and Let's dive deeper into
       | those questions/topics. The number of blank stares I got... like
       | I had a second head. I don't even ask anymore.
        
       | ralusek wrote:
       | Social responsibility in CS, in my experience, means that if a
       | given function doesn't produce equal outputs for two given
       | inputs, all it takes to suggest that the function is biased is an
       | assertion that the outputs _should_ have been the same if the
       | function _weren 't_ biased. How different the inputs were, even
       | along the criteria that the function actually uses in order to
       | produce its output, is completely irrelevant.
        
       | poorbutdebtfree wrote:
       | Leave DIE to the humanities and arts majors please.
        
         | MattRix wrote:
         | Why? It seems like something more CS students could learn
         | about.
        
           | mattanimal wrote:
           | [dead]
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-17 23:00 UTC)