In the readings I was really impressed by the fact that people had come up with guidelines for ethical decision making, but when I think about it, it really makes sense to have done so.  I wonder how they come to a decision about what frameworks are most useful in different situation between consequentialist, non-consequentialist, and agent-centered.  Perhaps, it would be in sort of a whichever makes the best case for itself in any given situation.  

In reading the ACM Code of Ethics my group saw the consequentialist approach show up as a sort of prompt for programmers to think about the possible effects their work might have on society should it be integrated universally.  As stated in class, the code itself and the expectation that it be followed by anyone who wants to meet the standards of being a good computing professional is representative of the non-consequentialist approach to ethics.  The agent-centered approach appeared as well in the way they headed off the sections of the code of ethics with the phrase “a computing professional should” thereby creating the image of the ideal virtuous computing professional who any aspiring computing professional should seek to mirror.

I believe it was touched on in class that a lot of the directives within the code are dependent on words that don’t explicitly lay out any particular behaviors, such as the word “respectfully”.  I imagine then, that if there is possible misinterpretation on the part of an individual in regards to whether or not their behaviors are justified according to the standards of the code, there would have to be some debate as to whether or not it qualifies as a violation and to what to degree.  All around, I’m starting to get a clearer picture of why ethics boards are necessary beyond of course, the obvious job of maintaining the standard, and moving more into the more nuanced job of creating the standard and evaluating its limits.

This discussion made me start reflecting on how I and others look at things. I feel that people often default to thinking of things from a consequentialist point of view. Perhaps this is because the result is a central focus for many. And despite our comments regarding the egoist approach and its opinion that “self-interest is a prerequisite to self-respect and respect for others,” I find that I see this approach expressed a lot by people both in and out of Grinnell.

I also got to thinking about the duty-based approach; for example, I got to thinking about how it can be applied outside an actual set of rules. In my “Theories of Culture” course, I took last semester, we spoke about the idea of “social fact,” which was postulated by Émile Durkheim. While this may on the one hand seem not to fall under the duty-based approach, I believe that some of these cultural norms can so heavily influence the individual without a directly written declaration, and many of these can be unethical.

Regarding “Don’t Get Distracted, I find it interesting that the author of, Caleb Thompson, stayed at his job despite the experience they refer to in the story. I felt that the story’s ending led me to believe that Thompson had quit their job.

At the end of class, Professor Rodrigues brought up the question of whether or not Thompson’s ability to tell this story is somewhat dampened by the fact that they completed their job at the DOD. While I acknowledge that, as Professor Rodrigues mentioned in class, first jobs can be tough and one may do things they didn’t expect to, I wonder if the author had included a bit about finishing their posting; perhaps, then, readers might not feel so disillusioned.

The recent push for education in coding/programming in recent years is what struck me most about the reading. This struck me the most because of my lack of exposure to anything computer science related until high school. I did not notice any coding camps, school programs or anything else geared toward computer science until AP Computer Science, offered my senior year. Even then, the class was the first one ever taught at my high school. Even the professor was unfamiliar with the material.

Therefore, I had trouble situating the push for coding/programming. My time in high school definitely saw the advent of preoccupation with STEM, but computer science was oddly left out. Reading this article made me wonder why my school district did not push coding as much as other schools apparently do. This reflection did not really come to fruition, but it was an interesting thought.

The other aspect of our discussion that piqued my interest was the semantic difference and the different connotations of ‘coding’ versus ‘programming’. One thing apparent to me from the discussion was the hasty effort to teach people to code, as opposed to how to program. I suppose a main reason behind this endeavor would be the relative ease by which one can learn to code. We have learned a bit of coding in this class, but many complicated aspects of computer science related to programming remain foreign to us. On the other hand, teaching someone to program probably requires more effort and time, so it is less appealing as a means of giving people marketable skills in the workplace. However, this neglect undoubtedly will inconvenience people who learn to ‘code’ languages that may become obsolete.

I felt that despite the more dense readings of Monday, we all were able to have a very engaging and productive discussion that went beyond my anticipation of what we would talk about. In doing my reading in preparation for class discussions, I often find that I forget that there are going to be two other readings for the class. Thus, having the “jigsaw” method always provides for an exciting addition of knowledge and perspective to what I believe we will discuss.

While we didn’t delve especially deep into this in class (it also appeared that Unsworth was a bit unclear on this as well), I am curious about the discussion of property and labor. Specifically, I am curious about the detachment of the human from humanity, where human is used and seen as the mode of production rather than an autonomous being (I am not sure if this is what people were referring to with Marx, as my memory of and exposure to Marxist theory is somewhat limited to a history class in high school).

Regarding my specific reading by Ritchie, one thing that seemed odd to me was the blend of technological history and social history. It felt like Ritchie was just adding random little “but it really was fun, and we were a community” type of notes in between large chunks of dense info on Multics and Unix. After talking on end about Unix as we know it today, Ritchie even chose to end the paper with a paragraph on looking back at his time at Bell Labs with a “rosy glow.” I thought this might tie into what we have been talking about regarding the treatment of creation as a fun thing rather than as a job.

As a side note, I struggled with writing this blog post, as I felt that there were many ideas brought up in class that were hard to unpack (you may notice that this post feels a bit all over the place). However, knowing that we usually continue and touchback on previous discussions, I know that things will become more clear!

After reading the article written by Vannevar Bush, I noticed a paradoxical link. So much of the effort and innovation of scientists during World War Two went to developing weaponizable technologies, such as the atom bomb, to win the war instead of these scientists’ actual areas of research. Moreover, many of the scientists who developed war technology later regretted it or had misgivings from the start, most famously Robert Oppenheimer. However, one can make the argument that without the menace of the Axis powers, many technologies originally used for warfare, but soon after adapted into commercial purposes, would not have been invented. Furthermore, I think this relates to a tangent we had at the end of class on Monday. A spider makes its web to catch flies. Without the need to catch flies, why would the spider need a web? Similarly, without the threat of military defeat why would the nations involved in the war have developed technologies such as nuclear fission, jet propulsion and better radar? I find this argument to be central to the question of why human beings do anything in the first place.

Does this mean that war is necessary for innovation? Conflict at least is in my opinion. If there is no discomfort, or vision of how things could be better, then no one would ever change anything. An unequivocal way to evoke change is through a stimulus. This may just be a regrettable fact of existence here, but it is inalterable.

While I did not participate in the discussion on Monday, it seems that there was a significant focus on the identities being represented and not represented in the field of computing. I am particularly interested in Haas’ reading on the Wampum Peoples use of hypermedia prior to the use of the internet.  Charles claims that it might not be plausible to suggest that the development of Hypertext and HTML were inspired by the Wampum but my own analysis of this differs significantly. Rather, I am asking myself why the conversation between the Wampum and the HTML developers are a separate entity. Computer science is, by nature, suppose to be a very collaborative medium but often the cross-cultural connections it posses becomes invisible. What then happens to our understanding of computing if we are able to hold both the advancements of the Wampum and the HTML developers together in the same collective narrative.

This pushes into a larger discussion of how computers consistently evolve without other communities in mind. Perhaps our biggest challenge in the modern computational world right now revolves around making more people computer literate but too often in a language, and system that is constantly inaccessible to those not at the crux of its development.

At the end of Monday’s discussion, the whole class discussed the answers for some of the questions on the board. Out of these questions, I faintly remember one that asked if the American Indian traditions created the idea of hypertext. Since I did not read the article to its full extent, I am rather intrigued to ask a bigger question at arose from the previous one: is anything uniquely created?

I am not asking if today’s innovations are unique, rather I want to investigate if every single idea that we can come up with uses previous knowledge. I cannot speak much in regards of the reading, so I will instead use an example I brought up in class: did the spider create the idea of the world wide web? Thanks to the collective effort from the class to answer this question, we came to a conclusion that it is not the spider itself that created the idea; instead, it is the interpretation of such an idea to solve a problem that defines whether an idea creates another one. In other words, the world wide web does not look anything like a spider web, but they are similar in the sense that the connections between the web are similar the solution to connect all computers. Therefore, spiders did not create the world wide web. Rather, if it wasn’t for how spider webs are connected, the idea of the internet would not have been possible.

In a way, no idea is unique; instead, it is a combination of previous knowledge that allow for further innovation to flourish. 

Our discussion towards the end of class on Monday concerning the role of race and gender played in the development of hypertext raised questions for me, particularly concerning Vannevar Bush. I wonder whether the racial biases and sexism of the pioneers of computing had a tangible effect on the development of specific technologies, and whether this persists today?

Haas’ work detailing the history of hypermedia within Native American’s wampum tradition broke up the white-dominated discussion of computing. Clearly there is a form of multi-media and modal, non-linear story telling in Native American culture that predates the development of the internet. It might not be plausible to suggest the developers of hypertext and HTML were inspired by wampum, but it sure is plausible that we see similarities between the two. Wampum demonstrates technical proficiency and mastery people fail to attribute to the indigenous tribes of America. Clearly, there is not a racial-monopoly when it comes to the ideas behind computing.

With this, there are some difficult issue to ignore. Though Bush did not explicitly discuss race, his use of coded language did much to reveal his prejudice. Did his views, and others’ like his, impact the development of hypertext? What he foresaw was a development which would specifically preserve the knowledge of the white race. In this way, the memex, and what eventually became hypermedia and the internet, were meant for white Americans. Based on this, it would not be foolish to suggest that the development of hypertext was done without consideration for racial minorities. Moreover, Bush saw the job’s of women eventually becoming irrelevant because of computing developments, rather than women being able to do more afterwards. Much of computing developments seems to be attributed to a monolith of white males; how exactly did this impact technological advancements and their perceived uses?

I didn’t know anything about the integrated circuit before the three readings regarding both its invention and large scale production, and I appreciated learning about the Navajo women in conjunction with Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce.  Hearing about the role that a seemingly unlikely population of women played in the production of what is one of the most important foundational technologies to our modern digital age, really helped me break down my own perception of what innovation looks like as a whole.  It is so easy to focus inventors and sensationalize and idolize them while completely ignoring all the necessary aspects of production following invention and all the people that are involved in that process.

Of course, these three readings together didn’t capture the whole story, but they did encourage me to look at innovation as an event that may start with particular individuals, but is ultimately carried out by a very large population of people who will often times remain unnamed.  The first integrated circuits started it all, but then there was also the necessary subsequent improvements, the efforts for large scale production, the various ideas that this technology inspired in others and so on, all of which has brought us to where we are today.

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.