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.
Francine Berman, Troy, NY, and
Vinton G. Cerf, Mountain View, CA
DOI: 10.1145/3084692
Technologies Do Have Ethics