Fostering Responsible Computing Research Foundations and Practices (2022) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
3 Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns for Computing Research
3 Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns for Computing Research
Pages 44-102
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 44... ...
Furthermore, an addi tional group of actors plays a role in the deployment of systems: the purchasers of those systems. Ethical and societal impacts are determined by technology choices individuals, 44
|
From page 45... ...
It provides two examples, each of which illustrates the need for policy and regulation to work in tandem with computing technology design and deployment. Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 45
|
From page 47... ...
Concerns about human dignity also arise well beyond the legal system, in domains as diverse as civic education, research on ethics, and broad efforts to reform public institutions and safeguard privacy in civil society. Human dignity is more than merely a Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 47
|
From page 49... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 49
|
From page 51... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 51
|
From page 53... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 53
|
From page 54... ...
To address environmental externalities, computing researchers will need to broaden how they view the impacts of computing technologies and consider the wide range of ethical values and trade-offs raised by these externalities. Significant strides have been made to enhance the energy efficiency of data centers and other infrastructure, drawing on computing research on more energy efficient components, architecture, and power and cooling designs as well as using renewable energy sources.
|
From page 55... ...
By educating government policymakers, and monitoring uses of computing technologies, computing researchers can help society better manage these risks. Although current computing researchers are not responsible for continued use of obsolete computing technology (e.g., in air traffic control or nuclear weapons command and control)
|
From page 57... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 57
|
From page 59... ...
Al 28 though computing ethics is an independent area of research in its own right,29,30 there is an ongoing need for more practically engaged and technically informed philosophical scholarship to help computing researchers better understand the ethical implications of their work. For responsible computing research, there is an urgent need for computing researchers to acknowledge that considering the societal and ethical implications of their work is an essential component of that work.
|
From page 61... ...
The discussion and examples presented in the subsec tions show that responsible computing research requires computing researchers to be transparent about the intended use situations for the computing methods and artifacts their research produces, limitations in their power and applicability, the assumptions about people's capabilities their performance rests on, and the range of situations in which they have been tested. These responsibilities are reflected in Recommendation 6 (especially 6.5)
|
From page 63... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 63
|
From page 65... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 65
|
From page 67... ...
For example, large language models built to support chatbots, voice assistants, and other language-centric systems are often described as "learning a language" rather than "learning large-scale statistics of word co-occurrence." These misdescriptions may lead to inappropriate research and deployment uses of these language models. For instance, dynamic employee scheduling Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 67
|
From page 69... ...
:7684-7689, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1915768117. Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 69
|
From page 71... ...
715-726 in Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, https://doi.org/10.1145/3461702.3462628. Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 71
|
From page 73... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 73
|
From page 75... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 75
|
From page 77... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 77
|
From page 79... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 79
|
From page 81... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 81
|
From page 83... ...
," Twitter, https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how. Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 83
|
From page 85... ...
For example, content creators have sought to understand the recommender systems that allocate attention online, in order to optimize the visibility of their content. This interplay is described at length in Bucher.114 Some argue that the tendency of social media companies to promote highly engaging, potentially divisive content has been operationalized by extremists in order to advance their economic and political interests, with deleterious effects on democratic public cultures.115 In addition, in recent years computing researchers have had to pay attention not only to strategic behavior by users, but to strategic behavior by competing computing systems, such as generative adversarial networks, whose role is to learn the behavior of a computing system and then confound it.
|
From page 87... ...
Many other ethical and societal impact problems in computing are not, however, of this nature. Rather, they arise from Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 87
|
From page 89... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 89
|
From page 91... ...
Crosas, 2021, "A Large-Scale Study on Research Code Quality and Execution," arXiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12793. Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 91
|
From page 92... ...
This ease with which researchers can find and use "found data" obscures a plethora of concerns critical to responsible computing research, each with potential ethical and societal impact. In particular, computing researchers undertaking a data-intensive research project should at the start of using any data set ask several questions about the data.
|
From page 93... ...
Gardner, 2021, "Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus," https:// aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.98.pdf. Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 93
|
From page 95... ...
w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag. Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 95
|
From page 97... ...
Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 97
|
From page 99... ...
org/10.1162/DAED_a_00113. Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 99
|
From page 101... ...
, and on the ability to determine the ways in which money flows to spammers and shut them down. Sources of Ethical Challenges and Societal Concerns 101
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.