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
april 1–2
Consortium for Computing
Sciences and Colleges (CCSC)
Midsouth,
Conway, aR,
Contact: larry Morell ,
email: lmorell@atu.edu
april 1–2
Consortium for Computing
Sciences and Colleges (CCSC)
Southwestern,
los angeles, Ca,
Contact: Stephanie august,
email: saugust@lmu.edu