If you follow the news in any capacity you are likely aware that technology companies, such as Facebook, are having a moment of reckoning and introspection about how the products and services they have created are affecting our lives. It wasn’t their intention to aid in the dissemination of false information , influence elections, or negatively impact your credit rating by tracking your social media behavior but it has either happened or is being researched and may be a fact of life in the future. These unintended consequences and uses are just some more reasons why you should be data literate and be aware of how data can be used.
Data has profound impacts on many aspects of our lives. Algorithms, often deemed by many to be non-biased by their mathematical and logical nature, often display the biases held by developers and promote common stereotypes, such as the bias imposed on black citizens by criminal predicting software . These proprietary algorithms are black boxes that commoditize the making of public policy and can have adverse, inhumane impacts on an unsuspecting society.
Some data scientists and technologists are proposing the adoption of a Hippocratic Oath for data scientists. Microsoft published The Future Computed – Artificial Intelligence and Its Role in Society , laying out an argument to have coders bound to such an oath and to “do no harm”. However, there are is no legislation or authority to enforce such a code and data scientists will still have to operate by their own moral compass.
The lack of enforcement for such a code, or oath, has some data scientists concerned that it will not adequately protect data scientists in the event that they raise ethical concerns with their employer. Since the code is non-binding, what is to stop an employer from taking action against the employee? What if the employer excuses an employee from an ethically questionable project only to fill it with another employee with no scruples or concerns about the impact of the algorithm and its use?
I personally think for the most part that the data science and technology professionals want to do good and make life better by solving complex problems for society. However, many of the players can be naïve and blinded by the power they wield with statistics and code and can often be overzealous. I wonder if it is time to begin something like the professional engineer licensure or the qualified person (QP) endorsement like we use in the mining and resource estimation industry. There are sanctions, fines, and sometime jail time if we act or advise our clients or employer in an unethical manner. It is the same for physicians. It is a big step forward for ethical programmers and data scientists to begin to realize their power and to pen something on paper to document how they want to be good stewards and operators in the data economy. However, at the end of the day, we are just people with needs, motivated by different things for different reasons. We make wonderful pieces of technology but unfortunately those things can come with a high price of admission and unintended consequences. It is not enough to take an oath, we must be accountable. And you must be data literate in order to understand all that is happening and its impact on you.
Let me know how you feel about this and if you have any experience with data or information being used maliciously or have experience with unintended consequences. Comment below and follow me on Twitter.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.