Moral Machines

5/16/2011 7:38 AM EDT

We should teach ethics to Engineers and Scientists, of course. Whether they would follow ethical codes in the workplace is another matter however. The whole economic system pushes people to act unethically at times, and it's hard to break the cycle.

5/19/2011 6:26 PM EDT

Great board theme, Rich! Ethics should be as mandatory in all curricula as writing or math is. And it should be taught in a way that emphasizes there are ways to measure it.

In college, my first year, my first quarter (believe it or not) I took two philosophy classes: Skepticism and rationality (Locke, Descartes, Berkeley) and Ethics. The first was much more mind-blowing than the second for me, but I remember walking away from that ethics class with a clear understanding that, like Descartes' view of the world, it's all relative.

And that is not helpful in dealing with a future that Rich begins to outline here. Yes, it's OK (I suppose) to lie to save a human being's life, but it's not OK to state publicly that you can double storage capacity and then not double it.

How many hundreds of thousands of products of all shapes and sizes are marketed with unethical claims?

We could bring the economy to its knees, or, more likely, we could create a culture of marketing that is perhaps more honest with its customers. They will appreciate it.

5/20/2011 3:30 PM EDT

I don't think engineers need to be taught ethics as much as I think it should be taught to sales.
After the fact, I'd learn that the salesperson had promised twice the performance from the system I had created. The customer was using the system at half of what I had delivered and would never achieve the maximum of what I had delivered, but it burned me that the salesperson had made an impossible claim.

A later system, the client insisted at seeing it perform at the contracted maximum before they would sign off. I calculated, even at 100% performance, it would fall short of the contracted value. Did the salesperson get blamed? No, my manager and I were blamed. My manager was eventually fired over it. He was an excellent manager, but the salesperson was better at politics and emerged unscathed. I had a dark cloud thrown over my abilities.

I learned that salespeople will say anything to get the sale, knowing they will not be held responsible when the product fails to meet their lies.

I found this true at several companies I worked for.

5/20/2011 9:01 PM EDT

The fact is that EVERYBODY in a business needs to practice ethics. From the CEO and the board of directors all the way down to the guy who sweeps the loading dock. Sales people do have a way of making claims for product performance that engineering said could not be reached for much more than the selling price. The problem is then that sales gets a reward for selling and engineering gets hammered for not being able to deliver. But even worse is the board of directors who give a bonus to the CEO for having the sales force lie about products, and then the financial disasters, because "It's not OUR money".

5/21/2011 8:54 PM EDT

Another thing that MS do that is lying, is when you try and access a website in IE that is not working. The loading bar at the bottom moves slowly, making you think it's just a slow site. Then a couple of minutes later it will give you an error. The site was never actually loading, MS is just lying like a cheap watch....

My employer is having a big push on ethical conduct at the moment. Not because of any high principles, but because a few employees were rorting the travel allowances and the company was losing out....

5/24/2011 12:47 PM EDT

Are we saying that Asimov's 3 laws of Robotics are not sufficient enough?

What is ethical & acceptable in one country may not be so in another country. Hugging a female friend may be OK here, but not in Asia. Are you going to have different version of ethics program then?

For instance, in Asia, we have to respect our teacher & don't ask much questions in class that will embarass them. But in US, challenging questions are OK & ethical.

The conclusion is that moral values of each country has already been programmed into engineers/programmers of each country by the society at large.

5/24/2011 12:50 PM EDT

Ethics shall be a must to engineering student. I remember it was a compulsory subject at the time. The biggest challenge was I wasn't allowed to get a low score or I would have to retake it. After all these years, I started appreciate what I have learned from the class and I feel it is an important subject to any subject and profession.

5/24/2011 1:39 PM EDT

The three greatest accuracy / ethics in consumer technology challenges facing the world today are:

1 - Developing an accurate battery capacity used vs remaining measurement tool
2 - Developing an accurate progress bar for installing things in a Windows computer
3 - Understanding the difference between theory and reality in product specifications.

In seriousness, my number three is a real challenge facing designers and consumers today. One only has to look at CFL life spans, theory vs in practice or WiFi range, theory vs in practice. In both cases (as in the Windows install progress bar) the actual number in the field seems to be little more than random.

It's easy to blame marketing for exaggerating specs to try and get an advantage over the competition, but some of this is an engineering problem.

For example, is it ethical to design and produce a light that, in a perfect setting in the lab, will last eight years, but in real-world use may last as little as a month? If you sell it as a month-long light, sure. If you sell it as an eight year bulb, I'd say no.

Is it ethical to tell the world that you've changed the game and made electric motors significantly more efficient when you know that their simply isn't enough of the materials required to scale up to viable production levels?

Is it ethical to design methods for turning waste chicken fat into bio fuel when there is only enough available waste chicken fat to fuel and extremely tiny percentage of the actual fleet?

5/24/2011 2:30 PM EDT

Everyone has a different definition of ethics and morality, especially when comparing these between various globals countries and religions. The key from my perspective would be to set up an oversight to ensure standards are defined prior to the beginning of a project, and maintained throughout.

5/25/2011 11:57 AM EDT

I like this topic, it is of critical importance and I have located few relevant treaties of this matter.
There are lots of good fiction writings of this topic, since it is assumed that its impact will only be relevant in a distant future, when the accumulated knowledge of appliances and robotic servants will reach the singular moment of conscience. But as stated in earlier posts, the topic is relevant now, since there are lots of technical choices been made by a design team in the best interest of the product deployed. But what happens when the commercial forces collide with the technical limitations, who should take responsibility for identity-theft possible due to a back door, or a weak encryption scheme?
What should be the cost to bear in the utility market to protect critical assets?
When a product is misused, it is not always easy to determine the party at fault, was it negligence from the user, or the design cut corners to be the lowest cost?
Not always lack of ethics but gray areas of multiple interests at stake.