Enough Already with
Patent Profusion

I was seriously dismayed by the descriptions of three U.S. design patents in Pamela Samuelson’s Legally Speaking column “Supreme Court on Design Patent Damages in Samsung v. Apple” (Mar. 2017): “a black rectangular round-cornered front face for the device”; “a rectangular round-cornered front face with a surrounding rim or bezel”; and “a colorful grid of 16 icons to be displayed on a screen.” The profusion of such patents is intended primarily to stifle competition rather than protect truly innovative work and has a detrimental effect on computational scientists and the general public alike. These examples represent clear evidence that the U.S. patent system is in serious need of re-form.

Nicholas Horton, Amherst, MA

Reengineer Peer Review to
Eliminate Reviewer Bias

Elizabeth Varki’s Viewpoint “Where Review Goes Wrong” (Mar. 2017) served computer science with its courageous and honest disclosure of struggles with the flawed scholarly peer-review system. As an ACM Fellow with more than 200 publications, I can attest to the problems she identified. I, too, have had papers rejected from venues on the basis of rants from the same reviewers. I was once able to make my case and solicit fresh reviews because carbon copies proved the same typewriter had been used. Digital documents and submission portals now make bias or abuse all but impossible to prove. Reviewing the same paper for more than one publication or conference is unethical, and reviewers should be required to recuse themselves on these grounds.

As someone who has seen the publication process from all sides— author, referee, conference organizer, and editor of multiple journals in multiple disciplines—I can say blind

THE CERF’S UP column “So- cial and Ethical Behavior in the Internet of Things” (Feb. 2017) by Francine Ber- man and Vinton G. Cerf was a welcome reminder of the importance of ethical issues involving sociotechnical systems in general and the Internet of Things in particular. Berman and Cerf did a great service giving them a high profile and thoughtful exposition. Here, we focus on their claim “ Technologies have no ethics.” Many computing professionals express this opinion, and we are confident many more believe it. But we think it is, as stated, a mistake, indeed a perilous mistake.

It is true that technologies do not “have ethics” in exactly the same way human beings have ethics. A human being is a carbon-based, biological entity, and any computer artifact (or other technological device) is fundamentally silicon-based and mechanical. Despite their differences, humans and technologies are interrelated and co-dependent. Society shapes technology, and technology shapes society. Technologies are the creations of humans; without humans, the technologies would not exist, and humans drive the creation of technology. Humans imbue their creations with moral significance, meaning their creations embody ethical decisions. Those ethics may be noble or they may be sketchy, but human ethics live inside every technology.

The 2009 book Technology and
Society: Building Our Sociotechnical
Future by Deborah G. Johnson and
Jameson M. Wetmore, as well as the
work of many other scholars of science
and technology studies, addressed so-
ciotechnical systems, including the
Internet of Things. In that context, we
explore some aspects of how ethics,
technology, and computing profes-
sionals are related. Sociotechnical sys-
tems include people, devices, policies,
and the connections among them. To
properly understand any technology,
the entire sociotechnical system of
which they are a part must be under-
stood. As technologies are developed,
they are already part of a sociotechni-
cal system that develops concurrently
with the technology.
At each stage of development of a
sociotechnical system, people make de-
cisions. Any system, including its tech-
nological components, embodies those
decisions. Most decisions, regardless of
how “technical” they may appear at face
value, have an ethical component, be-
cause technical decisions and human
values are intertwined. Sociotechnical
systems matter to people, and those
people are important stakeholders in
the systems. Decisions that shape the
systems and artifacts matter to people
and thus have ethical significance.

Because any technology is best understood as part of a sociotechnical system, and because both the technological artifacts and the systems of which they are a part have ethically significant human decisions embedded in them, these artifacts and systems “have ethics.” Such ethics are not identical to the ethics of a person, but they exist. Technologies have ethics; people put them there. And as technologies are developed, those ethics need to be considered by the people who put them there.

ACM Committee on Professional Ethics Authors Respond:

Any blanket generalization is risky so we accept the argument that one may find an ethical element built into some technologies. Many technologies are, however, sufficiently neutral that they can be used and abused in accordance with human choices, regardless of the intent of the technology developer. The Internet is merely one of many examples. Perhaps the way we can end up in the same place as the Committee is to observe that programmers (and, more generally, technologists) should feel ethical responsibilities in the course of developing new technology to assure it resists accidental or deliberately induced malfunction.