Our ethical discussion on Monday spanned many ethical issues, with consequences varying from companies being able to better target advertisements to Facebook users to technology potentially redefining the way we conceptualize war. I am consistently realizing that to refer to “ethical issues of technology” could mean almost anything.

Many of the morally dubious developments we have discussed remind me in some way of Caleb Thompson’s reflection. When Amazon markets facial recognition software to state law enforcement without testing it for racial bias, developers were on the other end coding small parts that built up to the final product. Individuals develop algorithms to collect your information from the internet, and others design advertisements specifically targeted at your psychological profile. Engineers build robots with the capacity to kill people autonomously. In these situations, who bears the responsibility to ensure that technology is developed in an ethical manner? Should individual developers, coders, and engineers be responsible or everything they create, or do those with broader views of the projects bear responsibility? Clearly, government regulation would help define some of these questions. However, the government often doesn’t fully conceptualize how technology is developing. Or sometimes, as in cases of weapon development, they are the ones creating the dangerous technology. Finally, what is the role of the formal computing profession? We read the ACM code of ethics, which provided some helpful guidelines for its members. Should groups like these be doing more to establish the norm that individual computing professionals are in some part responsible for what they create?

In class on Monday, we found many ways to approach ethics and very little consensus. Each of the three main areas of ethical reasoning seem to disagree with each other, and within each area each approach has something different to say. I was struck by the sheer number of ways to be ethical in any given situation. In one small group, we talked about utilitarianism, attempting to apply it to the case study Caleb Thompson shares. The most good for the most people seems straightforward initially, but in practice it presents difficult questions.

Who counts as the ‘people’? Do we factor in that Caleb felt guilty about his work as causing harm? How do we measure good? If Caleb had quit his job, wouldn’t someone else just have taken it and created the same result? Through the singular lens of utilitarianism, we came up with justifications for most of the possible actions he could take. If there is that much divergence within a single ethical framework, imagine how many perspectives there are when opening up to other consequentialist approaches then adding all approaches.

Maybe this multitude of views mirrors how we make ethical decisions. Personally, I can think of a time I used almost every framework to make some decision. Sometimes it seems very likely I can control the impact of my actions, so a consequentialist approach seems appropriate. Other times ambiguity about the consequences leads me to rely on general principles. Other times, especially in new or unfamiliar situations, I feel compelled to look to others who may be more experienced as role models. Each of the theories offers a unique perspective and seems to apply better to certain situations.

In class on Wednesday, Professor Rodriguez asked us to think about how each of the three articles we read overlapped. Two of the articles had significant pieces in common. They were more traditional pieces: one was a history of computing, the other a Nobel lecture by Jack Kilby, the inventor of the integrated circuit. The piece focused on technological development, invention and innovation. They depicted men alone in their workshops taking up ideas and crafting hardware that would fundamentally alter the trajectory of computing. History was linear and glorious, and prestige was available to those who worked hard enough in the right industries. The third article had notably little in common with the other two, which was to me the most notable and the most important answer to the question of overlap. It described the way Navajo women were exploited in the mass production of circuit chips. Men like Kilby and these women stand in stark contrast. Kilby is an example of why we see the American dream as unlimited social mobility. The women are examples of the harsh limitations of this dream, and the barriers in place for those who do not start in a place of relative privilege.

In our discussion on Monday, we talked about the humanness of computing. The first computers were humans who were able to perform complex calculations. Once we developed machines called computers, they remained an output of human developments, closely tailored to the needs of individual industries like business and the science. We often view technological developments as something that will drastically alter our way of life, revolutions that will change how we relate to each other and the world in an instant. Instead of remembering that humans developed them, we view technologies as independently imposing themselves upon society. As Mahoney puts it, “there is society strolling along, minding its own business, and, wham!, it gets impacted and is left reeling by a revolutionary technology, which changes everything overnight or in some similarly short time” (121). He proposes that history is actually much slower than instantaneous breakthroughs and dramatic effects. This is true; everything cannot change in an instant. However, the slowly building computing developments do still have drastic impacts on the way we live. The world may not have changed much the day the first iPhone was released, but my life is significantly different than it would have been 10 years ago due to my owning one. How does the speed of adoption of new technologies impact how they change our lives? Does the slow build of increasingly advanced technology mean that it becomes gradually irreversibly built into our lives rather than becoming a fad, briefly impacting our lives before fading away? Regardless of the pace at which we adopt new technologies, they will always be the result of human innovation.