Computer Ethics

 

                                                                        (Illustration by Nan Lee)

Computer Ethics



The Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics were created in 1992 by the Computer Ethics Institute. The commandments were introduced in the paper "In Pursuit of a Ten commandments for Computer Ethics" by Ramon C. Barquin as means to create "a set of standards to guide and instruct people in ethical use of computers"(Academic, 2022). Ethics are present everywhere around us, at different ages in almost every domain currently existing. In this post we will examine commandment nine of the computers science ethics and the reason why ethics are crucial .

Commandment Nine

Thou shalt think about the social consequences of the program you write or the system you design: Looking at the social consequences that a program can have, describes a broader perspective of looking at technology. A computer software on release, reaches millions. Software like video games and animations or educational software can have a social impact on their users. When working on animation films or designing video games, for example, it is the programmer's responsibility to understand his target audience/users and the effect it may have on them. For example, a computer game for kids should not have content that can influence them negatively. Similarly, writing malicious software is ethically wrong. A software developer/development firm should consider the influence their code can have on the society at large. (Thompson, 2021)

Children, video content and YouTube platform

To continue, we will analyze an aspect of bad ethics practice in one of the most famous app: YouTube. The main consumers of YouTube content are children and toddlers. YouTube video library has a massive inventory of videos designated for our little ones. A well known video among others is "Family Finger" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJyNoFkud6g ) with a shocking 1,280,383,275 views and it comes from a channel with 10.7 million subscribers. There are millions of such videos with a list that is almost endless. The disturbing facts about these videos is that they are an addicted content with creators using different techniques to make things even worse. Such techniques can include "catchy" songs, colorful videos and latest the assembly of collections of such videos that keep children starring at screens for hours and hours all day long. Such videos are uploaded from various random accounts and they are being created by professionals or amateurs or they are automatically assembled by software. To make things even worse YouTube has a build in feature called "Auto-play" which creates this endless loop of play content based on algorithms that use customer feedback to recommend similar content. Just after few steps of auto-play we will notice that videos content will change drastically because a software can not have the same understanding of similarity and morals as a human mind. (Bridle, 2019)

"Algorithmically organized mega platforms like YouTube may host quality content but are expert at incentivizing the creation and consumption of click-bait — thanks to ad-targeting business models that are fed by recommendation systems which monitor user inputs and actions to identify the most clickable and thus most addictive stuff to keep feeding them (Lomas, 2017). Parents had reported that their children start to be scared of dark, developed a phobia for their favorite cartoons characters and speech delay. When this problem had been raised, YouTube answer was that they will deploy better software into an attempt to moderate content. The company come up with a solution stating that they will create a version of their App reserved for children and the content will be entirely managed by humans 24 hours a day instead of algorithms. "YouTube's Community Guidelines state that the company works 24 hours a day, seven days a week to find and remove content that violates its ethical standards. Yet the same poor-taste, non-age-restricted videos appear there week after week, month after month"(O'Reilly, 2010).

To that degree as children are concerned, the message being generated via YouTube’s platform is frequently nonsensical for human mind, completely chaotic and random. We can understand that Ethics is an aspect of our lives that require more attention especially into the field of technology. Online information travel faster than before and has a wide range of accessibility to millions of people. With such wide range of customers the effects of bad ethics could be devastating for our society.

References

Academic, 2022. Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics. [online] Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias. Available at: <https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/2843552> [Accessed 27 April 2022].

Bridle, J., 2019. [online] Youtube.com. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9EKV2nSU8w&t=865s> [Accessed 27 April 2022].

Lomas, N., 2017. TechCrunch is part of the Yahoo family of brands. [online] Techcrunch.com. Available at: <https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/12/i-watched-1000-hours-of-youtube-kids-content-and-this-is-what-happened/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAEarVGPptNVYpNNLt3YlOchXC-N2tho2wDiZxPzRY2IQ__Ouo2XXdq2Ry-yipYRtuxhK0sZ8POlRnHLOf52WWaj7CsHo55ve5qb3sNtx7w1_pBxd3MO-6kwKjmr3HzatjToMSpnhJqWGP-wYXh4naIOONMc9QydobvXIN8diBmVy> [Accessed 27 April 2022].

O'Reilly, D., 2010. The Internet and the death of ethics. [online] CNET. Available at: <https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/the-internet-and-the-death-of-ethics/> [Accessed 27 April 2022].

Thomson, 2001. Redirecting. [online] Doi.org. Available at: <https://doi.org/10.1016/S0168-1699(00)00158-7> [Accessed 28 April 2022].