500+ word response to all readings from 29 Aug and 3 Sep including Chapters 13 and 14 - find common concerns in the articles and reflect upon them.
The articles seem to generally violate some of the basics ethics states in the ACM code of ethics.
When thinking about examples that are about avoiding harm to others (1.2) the Therac cases come to mind. As a software engineer, I feel that we should be aware of the possible repercussions of a bug in our code especially when regarding the medical field. We should do so by taking extreme safety measures and doing extra testing. This bug resulted in a minimum of six cases of radiation overdose, which resulted in nasty side effects like hair loss, vomiting, weakness, and fever to mention a few.
When technology is taken advantage of and controlled by remote parties unknowingly, it violates respecting an individual's privacy (1.7). An example of this from the text was when vehicles are vulnerable to being hacked and someone who is capable of it does so. Not only is this a scary thing to do, because the controller is not only taking the drivers and all of the drivers passengers lives into their hand, but they are also taking all of the other lives of the individuals in the cars around them. No wonder people are scared of people who are good with computers. I would be terrified as well. I don't see what good can come out of this unless we are talking about self driving cars. This not only adds to the negative reputation some people view computer scientist under, but it also gives them a personal fear against us. How are we expecting people to come to us when they feel like they have problems regarding their security when they do not know who to trust?
When developers reuse code I have found it is critical to only implement what you believe is necessary. There are plenty of times in homework assignments that built off of each other I import the entire past assignment when it is only necessary to reuse 1 or 2 methods. Not only is this an example of waste, but in Ariane 501’s case it resulted in a fatal ending. When I read cases like this is it clear to me that my bad habits could one day negatively impact a project or god forbid many people.
I think a lot of software problems come from unrealistic expectation weather that be the time to create the project, expectations of development advancement, lack of structure and goals, lack of leadership, or a lack of guidance. We should be taking the time to complete our projects in the amount of time we truly believe it will take, not trying to do it as fast as possible to look better to management or not extremely slow to get paid for under performing.
These cases show how vital it is for engineers to perform their due diligence on projects prior to releasing them. Although I am reading all of these cases upset me for the mistakes that have been made in the history of software development, they are in a way crucial to alert engineers of the severity of our actions and a reminder of what all we have at stake going into this field. Before I delve into the depths of computer science, my impression was that oh I would just write some code and run a little program. I never completely developed my thoughts as a freshman in college of the true impact we as computer scientists can have on society. I am so thankful being on the other side of that thought spectrum now for classes like Software Engineering and Seminar on Computing and Society for raising these crucial concerns about ethics. The ethics of computer science may seem simple and straightforward at first but when you take one step closer and think about where technology is heading now (machine learning and AI), it is easy for the lines to get blurred.
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