Interview Available

Why Should We Care About Technology Ethics?

What is the work you’re doing today?

The recent work I've been doing has been on what we call responsible research and innovation. This concept has come out of European funded projects looking at how we can make the tech industry better in terms of serving society with their innovations, as opposed to the primary goal of making a lot of money (or getting the most users).

Last year the ACM updated the Code of Ethics. What was your role with them?

I was on the steering committee to redevelop the ACM Code of Ethics. I was invited to do this because of my history looking at things like how do we practically integrate ethics in industry, how do we make a more responsible ethical society through tech, how do we get tech working with and for society, and the like.   The reason we updated  it in the first place is because the previous version was written in 1992, which is a little bit out of date. Since then, the Internet (and many other new and exciting technologies) came along, and it affected society in completely new and interesting ways that we didn't actually expect when the original code was written. Don Gotterbarn,  who was involved in writing the original code, was the chair of the Code update committee.