Communications of the ACM

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.

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