USACM Responds:
We share the authors’ concerns, as
USACM has continued to engage in this
area since its cited 2006 report through
a variety of mechanisms, including
congressional testimony, responses
to formal government requests for
information or comments, and letters
to government bodies. USACM’s most
constrained resource is the time of its
volunteers and limited staff. We thus try
to avoid duplicating the efforts of others,
including work being done by Verified
Voting and the National Academies, both
involving USACM members. There is,
however, always more that can be done,
and we would welcome the authors’
contributions to USACM.
Stuart Shapiro, Chair,
ACM U.S. Public Policy Council
Side with ACM Ethical Values
Bob Toxen’s letter to the editor “Get
ACM (and Communications) Out of
Politics” (May 2018) said ACM was
becoming too left leaning by taking
decisions with more than a tinge of
political motivation. In particular,
Toxen said ACM should focus more
squarely on technology. But politics is
indeed inescapable when addressing
policies that directly affect the field
of computer science; for instance,
immigration policy in the U.S., as
well as every other country, has a
direct effect on whether technology
companies are able to attract and retain skilled workers, no matter where
they might come from, in turn affecting the development of many technologies. Where would we be today
if, say, Sergey Brin had been unable
to emigrate to the U.S. from the Soviet
Union in the 1970s or been separated
from his parents at the border? Would
Google even exist today if he had been
forced to stay home? What would be
the state of computing technology if
Google had never existed? Likewise,
passage in March 2016 of the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act
in North Carolina was a direct violation of the ACM Code of Ethics and
Professional Conduct, 2 which obligates ACM and its membership to
be fair to all and not discriminate.
How could ACM in good conscience
host a conference in a jurisdiction
that had discriminated against some
of its own membership? It would be
just and within the ACM mandate to
change conference venues to respect
those values.
ACM must also recognize that systems can be deployed for harmful, as
well as for good, purposes. A central
pillar of the ACM Code1 is to avoid
harm to others, requiring ACM and
its membership to take moral and
ethical decisions on the use of technology that might seem to many
otherwise reasonable professionals as political. Consider Google’s
work with the U.S. Department of
Defense to develop AI systems that
could enable drones to more effectively identify targets on the
ground. Many Google employees
have objected to the program due in
part to the potential harm it might
cause innocent civilians. Following
this outcry from its own employees,
as well as from the broader community, Google decided to not renew the
program. 2
ACM could, as Toxen suggested,
remain narrowly focused on technology, leaving moral and ethical
discussion to the political arena or
engage in ways that might force it
to take sides in the political arena.
In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Holocaust witness
Elie Wiesel said, “We must always
take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence
encourages the tormentor, never the
tormented.” In light of recent political and social events and advances
in technology, particularly AI and,
potentially, autonomous systems,
today might be the right time to
build a community, perhaps even a
special interest group, dedicated to
issues of ethics and public policy.
References
1. ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.
Association for Computing Machinery; https://ethics.
acm.org/
2. Wakabayashi, D. and Shane, S. Google will not renew
Pentagon contract that upset employees. New York
Times (June 1, 2018).
James Simpson, Chatham, ON, Canada
Communications welcomes your opinion. To submit a
Letter to the Editor, please limit yourself to 500 words or
less, and send to letters@cacm.acm.org.
©2018 ACM 0001-0782/18/8
A Domain-Specific
Architecture for Deep
Neural Networks
Deterministic
Database Systems
Is Software the Result
of Top-Down Intelligent
Design or Evolution?
An Academic’s
Observations from
a Sabattical at Google
Peer-Assessment
of CS Doctoral Programs
Is Highly Correlated
with Faculty Citations
Can Beyond-CMOS
Devices Illuminate
Dark Silicon?
Emotion Recognition
Using Wireless Signals
Workload Frequency
Scaling Law—Derivation
and Verification
Research for Practice:
FPGAs in Datacenters
GitOps: A Path to
More Self-Service IT
Plus the latest news
about robotic implants,
borders in the cloud,
and poker-playing AI.
ComingNex
tMonthin C
OMMUNIC
AT
I
ONS