Do any of us expect that the computer scientists who invented and standardized TCP/IP could have reasonably anticipated Facebook and the fake news problem it would have?

I would posit that there was no good way to reasonably forecast it at that time. This isn't an irrelevant point, though it will seem that way at first blush. The point is that it's difficult to forecast significantly in advance the consequences of technological advancement. That the people asked to do the forecasting are not trained in analyzing social trends does not make this task easier.

Facebook per se? No. But I'm a math grad. Yet I ALSO have this ability to read English (and Spanish and some Portuguese, but I'm not here to brag.) Wow. Look at that, I've mastered a couple different sets of syntax that enable semantic understanding.

And there are books written in English that talk to the social history of the species. History, physics, etc, being subsets of English syntax (or other "human languages") tailored to describe specific semantics.

A casual look at what happened over the years as various social bubbles suddenly slammed into each other; Columbus and Americas, repeated conquering of Europe and further east.

Doesn't seem a stretch to think "information network could be used for malicious shit." And it has been for years, depending on who talk to (content piracy, trafficking, AI guided weapons, etc) before Facebook. So there's a plain history in contemporary times too. No need to dig that far back into history.

And it's not advocating for binning the abstract research, or avoiding making these things concretely. It advocates for fostering a conversation about the potential pitfalls.

Like programmers do before considering a change.

Deep knowledge of the specifics isn't necessary, IMO. We code heads are already aware of "change in system may have bad side effects. Let's avoid it as much as possible." Emotional consideration is already there.

This thread is devolving into childish attitudes about having to be part of society. Division of labor taken to its extreme, leads people to just disregard they are a part of a bigger picture (society). What did Adam Smith have to say about such things? All the way back in the 1700s. And he had no where near modern formal training. Seems rather spot on here.

You're absolutely right. There's a long, ugly, and documented history of what can happen when isolated societies slam into each other. The answer is almost always violence, exploitation, and oppression.

Is it possible that this might not have been the planned result of TCP/IP, however? At the time there was just one social bubble and the point was to enable two computers already in it to connect in a more standardized manner. The notion of using the system for malice largely didn't occur, because at that point there was no reasonable way to gain from doing so. People weren't trying to engineer globe-spanning society-merging information networks.

But never mind that. Reasonable people can disagree on questions like the accuracy of our ability to correctly predict the future from 45 years away and counteract those potential distant negative consequences.

Moving on to what I consider the more interesting point: the process proposed. It's pretty clear that this isn't about fostering a conversation. You do not need enforcement mechanisms to foster a conversation. Enforcement abilities - like rejecting papers, which always comes with the risk of killing a paper forever - are about coercion. Maybe there's another way, like including ethical statements outside review processes, with papers that could both foster conversation and not rely on coercion?

You're right again! Fostering conversation is immensely valuable. We are all part of a vulnerable and critically important society. It is our moral obligation to think about that as we look at our work and discuss it with our peers while also being humble and aware of our own limitations. We can, should, and must do this absolutely critical work. The future depends upon it. We are called to the work.

> whether Computer Science (the academic discipline) should focus more on the societal impact of computing.

The people behind http://interactions.acm.org/ would say YES. I bet most of academia would say yes.

The general public too. Ask any non-nerd if they are aware that by accessing their Gmail account via a third party service, that that service can read their emails. I’m sure that the majority will be freaked out by even the notion that that would be possible. Horrified even.

Then ask them if they understand just how much data Google & Facebook has on their browsing history via cookies, third-party trackers, adboxes & share buttons.

Then ask them if they know that, if they did an ancestry check, their DNA data may soon be shared with their insurance provider?

Then ask them if they know that their credit history was probably leaked to the public via the Equifax hack?

Then ask them if they know that all that data is legally allowed to be used forever with minimal oversight other than what’s mandated by law?

All of the above is obvious to nerds like us but the public at large haven’t got a clue about any of this.

> The more interesting question is whether Computer Science (the academic discipline) should focus more on the societal impact of computing instead of solely on the technical implementation of computing

This is a very long and especially old discussion, I'd say it approaches 150-200 years, and it first started out as a reaction to the optimistic views of positivists like Auguste Comte. Afaik nothing conclusive has come out of it yet, even though the discussion focused on some heated topics during all this time: should the physicists that invented the atom bomb be held responsible for Hiroshima? should the chemists be held responsible for the mustard gas used in WW1? should the bureaucrats with their focus on modernizing the State and having everything well-labeled and well-counted for be held responsible for the fact that that made the Nazis' job a lot easier when they needed to find the Jews among the general population? etc etc

It’s not about holding particular people responsible in hindsight.

It’s about having a public debate to decide what laws are needed to robustly protect the public before the technology is even misused.

So in your examples it’d be:

- when the physicists inform the public, MAD is quickly determined as the outcome of that technology and laws made to prevent nukes being made in the first place. (And optimistically, to negate wars ever happening again due to the possibility that an aggrieved side might develop nukes) Or, because the public debate did not happen until after they were developed and deployed, to allow nukes to be developed and defer wars between nuke-enabled countries to hyper-diplomacy while making every effort to restrict development & deployment, like we currently have.

- when the chemists alert the public that chemical weapons are possibly far more effective than anyone ever imagined, then laws are made to ban their deployment. As is currently the case after informed public debate. But instead of informed public debate before the fact, millions were gassed during WW1.

- when the bureaucrats realist they can identify large swathes of the population unrestricted, laws can be brought in to restrict data gathering to protect the public from such actions.

In all of your examples, an informed public debate could have urged politicians to create laws to robustly protect the public from these technologies.

The key note to realize is that the public debate will happen. It’s inevitable. The key role that the creators of these technologies can play is to raise these ethical concerns before harm is risked. Even though the public debate did not happen until after all of the above technologies were misused, they resulted in swiftly creating laws to robustly protect the public from that technology. Delaying the debate does nothing other than risking disaster.

I know that last line sounds like hyperbolic exaggeration but it’s an inevitability that, if ignored, is unethical.

It's also worth considering that the public might decide that all this mucking around with injecting people with virii sounds like trying to kill us all. So vaccine use gets banned, and lots of people die from preventable diseases.

Or maybe a town refuses to flouridate their water after a series of propaganda campaigns convinces people there that it's toxic and will ruin the purity of their water system.

I understand why you cast it as you do. History is chock full of preventable abuses! Yet, it's worth considering that such things can backfire as well. Public debate is not a panacea, and policy is often rushed and poorly formed to satisfy atavistic fears. A public debate can easily urge politicians to robustly protect the public from imagined threats while enabling real ones.

Only if the whole population succumbs to ignorance. Not saying that doesn’t happen, especially in light of stuff like net neutrality and the NSA et al’s data gathering.

But on the whole, the general public will drown out cranks who shout about imagines threats like fluoride or vaccines. The science on both is clear.

Likewise, I’m optimistic that the negative realities of net neutrality stifling startups and the mass data-gathering will become so apparent to future generations of lawmakers & voters that they’ll be reversed in due course.

It doesn't take the whole population succumbing to ignorance. It just takes a bunch of voters who are uncertain and scared. This happened in Portland, Oregon a few years back when voters were terrified into opposing floridated drinking water.

The science may be clear, but it may be unwise to be too certain that future generations will agree with what you and I believe in today.

> They're not talking about computer programmers though (I agree they don't have the ability).

This pigeon-holing was way beyond tiresome, not to mention grossly inaccurate, 20 years ago: please STOP IT. Computer programmers aren't in general some special class of person incapable of learning new skills and behaviours. Quite the opposite for the most part.

I'm not sure I understand why you call this pigeon-holing. The GP explained that the professional field of programming has very little overlap with the professional field of social dynamics, and I was simply agreeing with that observation. "Most programmers don't know how society will evolve" appears to me a similar observation as "most pilots don't know how to build a plane". I don't really see why that's an objectionable statement.

This is, at its heart, a question of ethics in engineering disciplines.

Software engineering is a combination of applied mathematics, data science, and significant engineering practices (do X with Y constraints).

In Engineering proper, we have ethics classes. They entail in how things can fail and cause item, structural, and/or injury up to death.

We have all read about the Therac-25. That was a software and hardware design choice that lead to the death of many.

Computer science seems to skirt the ethics discussions just by being too new of a field. We (royal) aren't looking at the failure modes of having social media. Nor are we considering the ramifications of the code we write.

Intelligence is the ability to write the code. Wisdom is the ability to understand its ramifications.

From whence does this wisdom come? Experience by oneself, or learning of the experiences of others. How does one gain experience in, say, "having social media" if we've never had social media until the last few years? Social media hasn't been around long enough for a single complete human generation to have experienced life without it.

When MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, et al. were created, the "consequences" were providing an outlet for expression or keeping connected with friends and family. Noble causes. How do we get from there to "...and guess what, it'll be bad for individuals or society in $THIS_SPECIFIC_WAY"? I don't think it's possible.

Ethics evolve with society. Society will develop the ethics necessary to teach computer scientists and programmers. Such things are already underway[1].

Further, I'm seeing too little nuance in the comments on this story. Someone puts a Raspberry Pi in a situation to be responsible for human lives and it fails - is Linus now culpable?

1 - https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics

Easy example in recent software development history: the developers who built the software controlling emissions cheating on Volkswagen cars a few years ago. That lead to nearly a decade of overly polluting cars being missold to the public. Those elevated emissions are directly responsible to deaths among the populations in which those cars were sold.

It doesn’t take much study of history to see how cults form or the power of publishing anything you want as fact. Social media put the tools to do that in the hands of everyone.

I won’t make a moral judgement on that decision but it is dangerously naive to think all technology has only positive externalities. The criticism of the current state of software engineering is that we don’t consider those externalities.

“It’s new and we didn’t know what would happen” is a really shitty excuse to hear from an aerospace engineer after an airline crash.

A crash is the sort of outcome an aerospace engineering company should be able to predict. Celebrities burning huge quantities of aviation fuel on their way to and from conferences to pontificate about greenhouse gases isn't.

It's not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology even a few years into the future (much less the seventh generation that some folks talk about and that would, if adopted, bring progress to a halt), nor whether any elite should be trusted to decide whether to permit the adoption of some technology. (If you suggest the government, consider Trump and net neutrality.)

>It’s not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology

That’s the whole point of the article, no one person can ever figure that stuff out. That’s why the public needs tone informed. No matter how educated (malicious or not) an “elite” is, they’ll never be able to predict as much as the general public will.

Yet a wider public debate can.

Your example about greenhouse gases is a good example of this. Forget about the celebrities for a sec and look at the big picture:

The guys in the hydrocarbon industry were experts at their jobs: developing oil, coal & gas and selling those products. Likewise the car industry, experts at building and selling cars.

Their expertise is in building their particular products and selling them. They could not have been expected to understand the negative environmental effects. And moreover, it’s in their interest to ignore the negatives associated with their products because it’s much more profitable for them to produce cheap products that require little R&D.

It took insights from the general public outside those industries to realize how those products affect the population as a whole:

- Burning hydrocarbons releases far more CO2 than the planet can scrub via the carbon cycle, which has lead to the greenhouse effect. Not only that but certain types of coal produce the smog that once blighted our cities and literally killed people with weak respiratory systems. Not only all of that but the lead that was added to gas to prevent engines knocking, kills people too.

- Emmisions from cars not only add CO2 to the greenhouse effect but other car emissions such as carbon nanoparticles, Nitric Oxides, sulfuric compounds also result in measurable deaths among the populations living among those cars.

As a result, laws are passed to make cars release less emissions and also to reduce societal dependence on hydrocarbons. The public debate resulted in the population realizing that there are health hazards to both individuals in the short term and global climate in the long term, and resulted in laws being passed to reduce these health hazards as low as is possible right now.

Without informed public debate we’d never have realized that these negative effects occur and we’d never have saved as many lives as has been saved now that our cities are not drenched in lead and Nitric Oxide saturated smog.

No, but computer programmers aren't researchers publishing papers. I think the article is talking about research papers like this:

http://dblp.org/db/conf/focs/focs2017.html

So, what might the negative consequences be for An Input Sensitive Online Algorithm for the Metric Bipartite Matching Problem?