Communications - March 2011

The goal of the Presence Clock is to give the elder and caregiver a sense of mutual presence, even at a distance. A glance at the clock can give either party a sense of what the other has been doing; a change in routine might prompt a telephone call. It is less intrusive than a true surveillance system with an audio or visual feed, but could afford a great deal of comfort to both parties and enable an elder to stay in her or his own home longer than the caretakers would otherwise feel comfortable.

But it could feel intrusive to the elder, a trade-off between privacy and security that he or she does not want to make, but the caretaker insists upon. Responsible development and deployment of the Presence Clock is not just a technical and marketing challenge, but also a challenge in human relations and customer/user education.

…and thinking for themselves.

Perhaps even more troubling than machines that hide or drop from our awareness are machines that make choices without direct human intervention—generally termed “ autonomous systems.” Keith W. Miller, the Louise Hartman Schewe and Karl Schewe Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Springfield (to whom I owe the title of this column) highlighted one concern about autonomous systems in a presentation called “The problem of many hands when some of the hands are robotic,” in which he revisited Helen Nissenbaum’s 1994 article, “Computing and accountability.” 1 The problem of many hands lies in discerning or assigning responsibility when something goes wrong. The more people involved in a project, the more people there are to whom the blame can be shifted. When the technology is believed to be able to learn on its own and make its own decisions, there can arise a temptation— perhaps even a compulsion—to blame the machine itself, allowing the humans involved in its design, construction, and deployment to wash their hands of it.

I think it’s fair to say that most of the workshop participants deplored this tendency. Determining moral responsibility is a serious endeavor, and dodging or shifting blame (if that’s all one does) is irresponsible in itself. At the

Determining moral
responsibility is a
serious endeavor, and
dodging or shifting
blame (if that’s all one
does) is irresponsible
in itself.

workshop Miller started advocating for an effort to make a strong statement about the importance of accepting moral responsibility even in circumstances of complicated causality. Our time was too short to make much progress, but Miller has pushed the project forward in the interim. As I write this column in early 2011, Miller is working on the 27th draft of “Moral Responsibility for Computing Artifacts: Five Rules” (The Rules, for short) and has assembled a 50-member, international Ad Hoc Committee for Responsible Computing to improve drafts. It’s remarkable to get such cooperation and consensus from scholars solely over email; more so is that the document is only four pages long (see https://edocs. uis.edu/kmill2/www/TheRules/).

conclusion

I have only touched on what happened at the workshop itself, and mentioned only one of the ongoing projects the workshop inspired. More is happening and still more will be accomplished thanks to the enthusiasm of this remarkable group of scholars, the ripple effect that will let this workshop touch many more people than those who attended, and a small grant from the National Science Foundation.

Reference

1. nissenbaum, h. Computing and accountability.

Commun. ACM 37, 1 (Jan. 1994), 72–80.

Kenneth D. Pimple ( pimple@indiana.edu) is Director of teaching research ethics Programs at the Poynter Center for the study of ethics and american Institutions, an endowed center at Indiana university-bloomington, and on the affiliate Faculty of the Indiana university Center for bioethics.

Copyright held by author.

Calendar
of Events

March 19–23
Computer Supported
Cooperative Work,
hangzhou, China,
Sponsored: SigChi,
Contact: John tang,
email: johntang@microsoft.
com

March 21–25
tenth international Conference
on aspect-Oriented Software
Development,
Porto de galinhas, Brazil,
Contact: Borba Paulo,
email: phmb@cin.ufpe.br

March 22–24
6th aCM Symposium on
information, Computer and
Communications Security,
hong Kong,
Contact: lucas Chi Kwong hui,
email: hui@cs.hku.hk

March 22–24
4th international iCSt
Conference
on Simulation tools and
techniques,
Barcelona, Spain,
Contact: liu Jason,
email: liux@cis.fiu.edu

March 28–29
international Cross-
Disciplinary Conference on Web
accessibility,
andhra Pradesh, india,
Contact: ashley Cozzi,
email: cozzi@hq.acm.org

March 30–april 1
8th uSeniX Symposium on
networked Systems Design and
implementation,
Boston, Ma,
Contact: David g. andersen,
email: dga@cs.cmu.edu