Joshua Coon
Christian. Student. Photographer.
1/28/2017 1 Comment CODING WITHOUT CONSCIENCE“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” If I may, I’d like to tweak Lewis’ words with a little bit of a 21st century twist: “Coding without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” Lines of code control pretty much everything these days. Every touch on your smartphone, every swipe of your credit card, every time you start your car, every email you send, every web link you’ve clicked, even the blinking cursor on the word processor in which I write this article; everything we do now days can be more or less boiled down to a line of code. To some, this societal dependence on lines of code is of little concern. If it works, it works... Right? I suppose that could be one way of looking at it. As we build our lives and infrastructure with the devices that we code, maybe it’s time we consider more closely the implications of our blind eye. Bill Sourour, a former programmer for marketing firm in Toronto, Canada was assigned to simply build a seemingly innocent questionnaire for young women to best find the right medication to use. Unfortunately, in his article, “The code I’m still ashamed of,“ he said, “I wish I could tell you that it felt wrong to code something that was basically designed to trick young girls. But the truth is, I didn’t think much of it at the time. I had a job to do, and I did it.” His code directed young women to purchase a particular drug, even though it was against the law for pharmaceutical companies to do so. Later on, he learned that the drug that was being suggested by his questionnaire lead to depression and, in some cases, suicide. Since technology is now so closely woven into all of our lives, the need for ethical precautions in coding is greater than ever. Although this is no small task, it may serve our society well in the long run. An unethical coder can be just as dangerous as an unethical businessman or and unethical politician, if not more. If we licence the engineers that build our buildings and the doctors that care for our health, should we not consider doing the same for the men and women who code our devices? Due to the astronomical number of devices that execute line after line of code written by fallible people, implementing, if you will, a ‘checksum’ of sorts may be an idea to consider. This could mean a law that mandates all coders in industry to complete a credential program or maybe some sort of ‘ethical audit,’ where an organization could inspect closed-source code to ensure its integrity. Additionally, offering an avenue for coders to anonymously report unethical coding would go a long way to prevent things from slipping through the cracks. These are simply crude ideas to consider, but ideas nonetheless. As a modern and considerate society, we should begin to press into the issue of ethics in coding. It’s time for us to take a closer look at how the potential for unethical coding is a greater threat to us than we may think.
1 Comment
1/31/2017 07:57:34 pm
hey Joshua, it seems like you had some really good solutions in regards to certain problems that could probably be implemented. However, I would like to point out that, sometimes there might not be an easy answer to certain situations. For example, if an employer ask you to build a website for their drug but do to legal contracts the company puts you in a need to know basis, can the blame really fall to the coder? Additionally, although the developer of the program felt guilty for writing to code, he also failed to acknowledge that he wasn't directly responsible being that he wasn't aware of the drugs side effects nor was he knowing trying to cause harm to others. I guess sometimes it could be difficult to determine what is right or wrong and when to step in when you feel that what you are doing is truly wrong.
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