Ethics in Computing

Are there ethical issues unique to computer scientists? Not really. A computer scientist has valuable skills, but so do professionals in other areas. Any professional has the responsibility to fulfill contracts and avoid harming others. True, a computer scientist can hack information more sneakily than a cook can poison food. However, ethics is concerned with our actions, not the tools we use to accomplish them.

Life Domination

Online video games. Drugs. Work. School. Pretty much anything, good or bad, can become the dominating factor in our lives. What should the dominating factor in our lives be? As a Mormon, the answer is God. Yet, spending 10 hours straight serving God is not as simple as spending 10 hours watching movies. After all, serving God is not usually an activity. Instead, it is an attitude. We must be in the world, doing all those activities that could become dominating, and yet not of the world because our attitude is different.

Position Vlog

History

Some people say that we study history so that we don’t make the same mistakes our ancestors did. In that sense, history could easily be replaced with fictional stories. After all, any kind of story can teach us values and warn us against mistakes. What makes history unique?

In history, each of us is a character. Studying history, events that seem as unreal as dinosaurs can suddenly be placed in the context of our lifetime. It is an incredible feeling to realize that a famous person in a textbook is someone that you or I could potentially meet in real life. The most amazing part is the sense of empowerment that our lives can be stories too. Someday, people could enjoy learning about us just as much as they enjoy watching a fictional movie. That day could even be today. All it takes is for us to see our own lives as an adventure.

To the TA: I read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson for this assignment.

An Innocent Question

“Hi, what’s your major?” At first, the phrase seems a friendly thing, no different than “what’s your favorite movie?” Unfortunately, it almost always signals a brief and awkward conversation. Why? Well, my typical response is “bioinformatics” which is actually my simplification of computer science with a bioinformatics emphasis and math minor. The simplification doesn’t help. A boy will usually drift into an awkward silence, and a girl will usually say something like "that sounds so smart" and then begin the awkward silence. The problem with being a girl in a scientific major is the wave of intimidation that seems to precede you wherever you go. 

Fast Food

Homemade food is often cheaper and tastier than fast food. Yet, fast food still exists. Likewise, open source software development can be faster and cheaper than traditional software development, but traditional software development still exists. What makes fast food and traditional software development viable despite some obvious disadvantages? One answer is that both traditional software development and fast food are able to reach a wider audience. Good programmers often prefer open source, just like good cooks often prefer homemade meals. However, many people aren’t good programmers or good cooks. The power behind fast food and traditional software development is the ability to reach more than just hobbyists. 

A Typical Classroom

Two seats in front of you and one column to your right, someone has a laptop open. While listening to the speaker, you also notice that the person with the laptop has missed an obvious move in Free Cell, is planning a dinner date, and is using a program to take notes that you have never seen before. Halfway through absentmindedly reading his shopping list, you realize you haven’t paid attention to the speaker for a full ten minutes. Angrily, you conclude that technology is unnecessary and counterproductive. Unfortunately for you, your church leaders are encouraging you to use new technology to further the work of God. Forced to rethink your opinion, you acknowledge that technology itself isn’t evil. Just the person who was sitting two seats in front of you and one column to your right. Okay, maybe not him either. The real problem with embracing technology is that the decision impacts more than just you. You don’t want to be the person two seats in front and one seat to the right who is driving everyone else in the room crazy.

The Law of the Harvest

Is it always true that you reap what you sow? The answer to that has to be no. Even when the law of the harvest applied to an actual harvest, there was always the chance that your harvest could be stolen, or wiped out by an enemy army, or simply taken by the government. Given the possibility that we won’t reap what we sow, why bother sowing at all? Patents rest on the fear that we won’t bother to sow without the guarantee that we can reap the rewards. However, there are other possible reasons to work. One is the fulfillment received by making progress. Why else would we spend all day playing a mind-numbing video game while thinking about how we could be doing something useful? Often, it’s because we just want to beat this next level. Similarly, we work to see progress. That feeling of progress can’t be taken away, so it’s possible patents could be.

Guns and Information

Guns and information have at least one thing in common: controversy on how to control them. In both cases, there are two major camps. The first group distributes control to everyone. If everyone has a gun, then an unscrupulous individual can’t hurt a lot of people before being stopped. Likewise, if everyone has information, then organizations lose the power to control people through ignorance. The second view on control is to limit control to just a few people. For guns, making it hard to get a gun limits the number of unscrupulous individuals who obtain one. For information, limiting access decreases the likelihood that the information will be misused.

Another way to frame this issue is trust. Those who distribute control trust the general public to make the best decision. This is problematic because it is essentially trusting the average citizen who, statistically, will know little about any given issue. Giving someone a gun is different than teaching him how to use it. On the other hand, limiting information is trusting a minority to make the best decision. This is also problematic because the motivations of a minority are unlikely to line up perfectly with yours. For example, a business’s first priority is getting money. Protecting your personal information is secondary to that. If selling your information became more cost effective than maintaining your loyalty, the business would probably sell your information. In the end, most people would probably prefer to trust themselves over either the public or a minority. Unfortunately, for information and guns, that isn’t usually an option. Unless you happen to be part of the small minority controlling the guns or information, you have to pick either the minority or the public to make the final decision. As for me, I chose to trust the minority. Even if the minority doesn’t have my best interests at heart, at least they are more likely to have researched the issue.

Scotch Tape

The ‘miracle material’ graphene was discovered by examining scotch tape that was usually discarded. Is it common to throw away more than we realize? When dealing with data, we frequently discard a significant amount due to lack of quality or missing values. Maybe there is just as much value in examining the throw-away data as there is in examining the quality data. The main take away message is that there is still plenty to discover about the world. After all, the most intelligent scientist in the world could have easily missed the scotch tape.

Family History

My greatest barrier to working on family history is the nagging thought that a computer could be trained to build genealogies and list temple names without my supervision. Why should I give time to something a computer could do for me? So far, my best answer is that the more time and effort I put into something, the more it will mean to me. Family history requires my time because building genealogies and listing temple names is only part of the purpose. The other part of the purpose is to change me.

Traditions

The control-alt-delete shortcut on windows is traditional, yet Bill Gates admits that it was a mistake. Does the origin of the tradition impact its value? For some traditions, like waffles as a breakfast food, the origin probably doesn't matter. For others, like the value we place on college education, the origin could matter a great deal. In the end, the traditions we do bind us together as a culture regardless of the origins. However, the traditions we believe are worth examining.

The Limits of Computing

Amazing technological advances make it seem possible, and even likely, that in the future a computer could do most jobs more efficiently and accurately than a human. Is there anything a computer cannot be taught? It is already clear that a computer can be taught reason, because it functions through logic. A computer can also be taught natural language, as evidenced by IBM’s Watson. A computer can even be given biases that make it appear emotional. For example, training Watson involved a medical specialist teaching the computer which sites to trust. From an outsiders perspective, Watson was taught to be skeptical. It seems to me that a computer can be taught to at least mimic everything human except for one thing: a human can receive revelation from God. Unlike most information, revelation cannot be retrieved from the internet or observed from primary inputs like video or audio. Revelation isn't predictable and often it doesn't even seem reasonable. But, a human acting on revelations can always make better decisions than the best computer mankind will ever come up with.

The Digital Age

What word describes the digital age? I would pick exploration. I imagine that some people might find that strange. They might pick words such as change or scary. However, to me, these words are all effects of exploration. In the digital age, instead of exploring unknown continents, people explore ideas like what if a car had a built-in telephone? What makes the digital age unique is that many of our what-if questions can be tested through technology, even if it’s only a virtual reality. For example, a car with a built-in telephone can be tested using hardware, and a more abstract idea like living elves can be tested through an online game. This constant exploring and testing can lead to quick changes, like the spread of the smart phone or internet. The speed of the change and the change itself can both be scary. But the digital age was never about causing change or fear. Instead, the digital age was always about exploring.