I Was Wrong about the Ethics Crisis

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2024-12-29 16:30:04

The ethics crisis in computing was “launched” in 2018. In March of that year, The Boston Globe asserted, “Computer science faces an ethics crisis. The Cambridge Analytica scandal proves it!” This was in response to the Techlash,a where Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan described Silicon Valley executives as “moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength” and Niall Ferguson, a Hoover Institution historian, described cyberspace as “cyberia, a dark and lawless realm where malevolent actors range.”

But in my January 2019 Communications column,b I dismissed the ethical-crisis vibe. I wrote, “If society finds the surveillance business model offensive, then the remedy is public policy, in the form of laws and regulations, rather than an ethics outrage.” I now think, however, I was wrong. I think I was right to advocate for laws and regulation to address the adverse impacts of computing, but I now believe we do have an ethics crisis in computing.

What changed my mind? First, my anxiety about the ills brought on by computing has risen dramatically, as a perusal of my column over the past five years shows.c I bemoaned that humanity seems to be serving technology rather than the other way around. I argued that tech corporations have become too powerful and their power must be curtailed. I asked that ACM dedicate itself to the public good. I pointed out that Big Tech’s business models are unethical. I explained how technology increases societal polarization. I wailed that computing has blood on its hands. About two years ago, I started giving talksd on how to be an ethical computing technologist.