Yostivanich

Recently, I had a class project in which I had to track down a code of ethics for my career field, com­puter sci­ence. In the course of this research, some­thing aston­ished me. First, that it was pretty much impos­si­ble to find a local com­pany that had a code of ethics for their staff pro­gram­mers and sec­ond that the widely rec­og­nized inter­na­tional stan­dard of code of ethics for com­puter sci­en­tists was tremen­dously weak.

The first point, is hope­fully some­thing that was more based on the size of the com­pa­nies that I was talk­ing with. These were small one or two per­son shops, a code of ethics was decided to be more of a waste of time than would be worth deploy­ing.  How­ever the sec­ond is more alarm­ing to me, for rea­sons that I will dis­cuss here.

So what exactly are the inter­na­tional stan­dard that I am look­ing, the ACM code of ethics. ACM is an orga­ni­za­tion that is devoted to “advance com­put­ing as a sci­ence and a pro­fes­sion.” The orga­ni­za­tion is basi­cally the pro­fes­sional soci­ety for com­puter sci­en­tists. So a pretty good orga­ni­za­tion that would pre­sum­ably have a strong code of ethics to main­tain the integrity of the the profession.

4.2 Treat vio­la­tions of this code as incon­sis­tent with mem­ber­ship in the ACM.
Adher­ence of pro­fes­sion­als to a code of ethics is largely a vol­un­tary mat­ter. How­ever, if a mem­ber does not fol­low this code by engag­ing in gross mis­con­duct, mem­ber­ship in ACM may be terminated.

This is the last sec­tion of the ACM’s code of ethics deal­ing with Com­pli­ance with the Code and the Code here falls way short. The prob­lem with this code of ethics is that there is no way to really pun­ish some­one who has actu­ally vio­lated the Code. Unlike many other pro­fes­sional degrees, there is no dis­bar­ment or license to revoke. This relates to a dif­fer­ent prob­lem that I dis­cussed ear­lier where there is no set license that pro­gram­mers receive to say that they are acu­tally good pro­gram­mers. They can receive a degree, and they can have cer­ti­fi­ca­tions in a bunch of dif­fer­ent areas, but that doesn’t acu­tally say any­thing towards your skills as a programmer.

I liken a cer­tifi­cate as sim­ply say­ing that you knew enough to pass the test at the time, it doesn’t say any­thing about your cur­rent skill set. I used to have a Red Cross CPR cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sev­eral years back, yet in all hon­esty I wouldn’t have trusted myself to pre­form it as I was trained to. That isn’t to say that every­one is going to be this way, I know sev­eral other peo­ple who I am sure they would be able to pre­form CPR cor­rectly and with­out hes­i­ta­tion. But there is the crit­i­cal dif­fer­ence, the cer­tifi­cate said some­thing that wasn’t nec­es­sar­ily always going to be true. Granted this is a prob­lem with all sorts of areas, but at least a pro­fes­sional license says that a per­son isn’t just trained in this one tech­nol­ogy or this one par­tic­u­lar area of a field but is a knowl­edge­able about the entire career field. A bar exam doesn’t just cover the par­tic­u­lar field of law a lawyer is prac­tic­ing for instance a patent lawyer takes the same bar exam a real estate lawyer does.

This is cre­at­ing a real prob­lem in the com­puter sci­ence field in dif­fer­ent aspects. The one though that I see as the most impor­tant and that I want to talk about is the out­side view of com­puter sci­en­tists. This has roots in a prob­lem of mes­sages sent through the media, which gen­er­ally only por­trays pro­gram­mers as hack­ers and peo­ple who can take over any sys­tem within five min­utes or some­time dur­ing the com­mer­cial break. Which granted it makes for good drama and plenty of other fields have bad por­tray­als of their par­tic­u­lar field, crooked cops, uneth­i­cal lawyers, and bad doc­tors. How­ever how many crooked cops do you see in com­par­i­son to good cops? Now com­pare that same ratio to hack­ers and just plain pro­gram­mers? Or rather just try to think of a plain pro­gram­mer who just does their job, beyond a cer­tain Bond girl, I can’t think of any and even that is a bit of a strech.

How­ever this myth that all pro­gram­mers are bent on tak­ing over the world and with tech­nol­ogy becom­ing ever more impor­tant in our every­day life, there is a fear that I have seen being expressed by more and more peo­ple. The fear of uneth­i­cal pro­gram­mers poten­tially devel­op­ing a mali­cious pro­gram that say sucks off those frac­tion of a penny in inter­est to con­trol­ling the world’s energy. Bruce Schneier, a renowned expert in secu­rity, has a valu­able the­ory here, that the pre­ceived secu­rity and acu­tal secu­rity are both very impor­tant. That is, it doesn’t mat­ter how safe you actu­ally are if you don’t feel safe on the same basis if you feel safe and you aren’t that is also a bad thing. This is what I feel cre­ates the prob­lem in the aver­age person’s eyes the pre­cived secu­rity and actual secu­rity are vastly dif­fer­ent in terms of technology.

The real­ity is that there really is no sys­tem that is designed to hold pro­gram­mers account­able for their actions beyond the crim­i­nal sys­tem. Which there are inher­ent prob­lems with the jus­tice sys­tem, sim­ply in light of the fact that tech­nol­ogy changes so fast and well the polit­i­cal sys­tem is not exactly known for it’s speed. Granted at the same time there is a lot to be said for a sys­tem that is designed with flex­i­bil­ity in mind, tech­nol­ogy given it’s pace of inno­va­tion needs a flex­i­ble sys­tem over­look­ing it. I don’t know if any pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tion could ade­quately con­fer a license on com­puter sci­en­tists that wouldn’t be out of date within 6 months, espe­cially with the cur­rent state of evo­lu­tion on the web.

I think this is a very tricky area but a ques­tion of con­fi­dence needs to be answered, for both the pro­fes­sion and for soci­ety as a whole to not have a sense of fear towards tech­nol­ogy and com­puter scientists.