A+Very+Short+History+of+Computer+Ethics

== = = = = =A Very Short History of Computer Ethics by Terrell Ward Bynum=

Foundation of Computer Ethics § MIT professor Norbert Wiener during World War Two (early 1940s), a antiaircraft cannon “tracking” system involving a feedback (“nervous”) system. In his 1948 book on Cybernetics he wrote:

It has long been clear to me that the modern ultra-rapid computing machine was in principle an ideal central nervous system to an apparatus for automatic control; and that its input and output need not be in the form of numbers or diagrams but might very well be, respectively, the readings of artificial sense organs, such as photoelectric cells or thermometers, and the performance of motors or solenoids… we are already in a position to construct artificial machines of almost any degree of elaborateness of performance. Long before Nagasaki and the public awareness of the atomic bomb, it had occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good and for evil. (pp. 27-28)

§ 60’s & 70’s: Computer crime, ACM code of ethics, Weizenbaum’s ELIZA

§ New branch of “applied ethics”: Walter Maner teaching a medical ethics course in 1976 came up with the term “computer ethics”

Wiener-Maner-Gorniak hypothesis: “Computer” ethics will become a //new// universal, global ethics, and so will become the “ordinary” ethics.

Johnson’s hypothesis: Computer ethics are “new species of generic moral problems,” and will continue to presuppose existing ethical theories. Questions:

1. Consider the similarities/differences in the effect on society of: 1. The printing press, and 2. Computer technology.

2. Do you agree that we are in the second “permeation” stage of computer technology? When did this start?

3. Do you think that computers give wholly new ethical problems, or do they simply provide a new twist to existing ethical problems? Does it matter?