Crossroads - Summer 2014

the public’s concern over the impact of technology.

Today San Francisco, a beacon of computer science and technology, is becoming a powder keg of tense emotions and a burgeoning anti-tech movement. Income inequality and skyrocketing housing prices are seemingly exacerbated by the tech industry’s shift from Silicon Valley to San Francisco. A grass-roots movement, Counterforce, is forming against these large tech companies and using radical techniques to draw attention to housing and other issues. These actions seem to mirror the Occupy movement from three years ago, which tried to highlight the large inequalities and terrible practices perpetuated by the financial industry. How is it that the tech world, and computer science practitioners and researchers, are now at the center of it?

Of course there are an overabundance of views on computer science from the public: positive, negative, and between. As there should be. In fact we wish there were more skepticism and debate inside our field. We need to embrace and accept the fact that technology has both a positive and a negative impact. Our research and innovations can have long-last-ing implications at the societal, economic, and environmental levels. How do we as a community deal with this in a responsible way?

Looking at the current wave of ex-
citement around 3-D printing, we can
view it as a microcosm for how com-
puting technology can impact the
world and how the computer science
community plays a role in shaping
both the technology and the thinking
about its impact. 3-D printing has the
potential to change the ways we deliv-
er products, allow us to create custom
medical devices and orthopedics,
and change consumers into design-
ers. At the same time it can allow for
the unregulated production of poten-
tially dangerous weapons, and allow
people to easily make more and more
plastic junk—just as the “paperless
office” did very little but cause more
paper printing. Digital fabrication
and robotics also have the potential
to put millions of people out of work
dience about our role in designing the
technology we want to see. “You never
know until the future,” she warned of
the unintended consequences of our
technological pursuits. We don’t have
the luxury of waiting to see.
We need more critical debate about
technology and its impact on the
world today. It is enough to begin the
debate, enough to personally reflect,
and enough to share these feelings
with the community. To do so we need
to have more forums for discussion
within our field that are welcoming to
critical viewpoints. At the same CHI
conference during a talk on soft 3-D
printers, an audience member ques-
tioned the sustainability of the design
and if we really want to be designing
tools that make more “junk.” Origi-
nally the question was written off as
somewhat off topic. Looking back, it
should have been embraced more se-
riously. The top academic CS confer-
ences are the exact places where we
should be having this dialogue.
A big roadblock to having this kind
of debate is the lack of diversity at
these conferences and in CS in gen-
eral. In CS we are often a very techno-
literate and techno-positive group of
people, but we need to understand
there are different ways to approach
computer science and different per-
spectives from which we should think
about our work’s impact. By increas-
ing the diversity in CS, we increase
the number of perspectives.

In this issue, we look at diversity in computer science—reasons for its absence, first-hand perspectives, and possible solutions. Looking forward, we hope to continue to discuss and draw attention to the importance of diversity in CS at XRDS. But more broadly, we hope XRDS can be a platform to discuss and debate the role of technology in our lives, both for good and for bad, and to provide a critical view from many perspectives.

— Sean Follmer and Inbal Talgam-Cohen in the manufacturing sector. 1

Companies and researchers don’t set out with the intention to make devices that are harmful, but it is hard to anticipate how technology will be used and how companies may change. Small, scrappy 3-D printing startups emerged with goals of fostering an open source hardware community as an alternative to the entrenched power of large companies that control the product pipelines and means of production. However, as was the case with Makerbot, we have seen those ideals and visions disappear as these companies grow and are bought up by the very giants they were trying to fight.

Ultimately, we cannot ignore these concerns for the simple fact that it is extremely challenging to predict the future, to know how one small piece of research could change the world. At the recent ACM conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI), author Margaret Atwood, known for her speculative fiction such as The Handmaiden’s Tale, cautioned the au-

1 Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The second machine age: work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2014.