IT body proposes that AI pros get leashed and licensed to uphold ethics; The Register, February 15, 2024

Paul Kunert, The Register; IT body proposes that AI pros get leashed and licensed to uphold ethics

"Creating a register of licensed AI professionals to uphold ethical standards and securing whistleblowing channels to call out bad management are two policies that could prevent a Post Office-style scandal.

So says industry body BCS – formerly the British Computer Society – which reckons licenses based on an independent framework of ethics would promote transparency among software engineers and their bosses.

"We have a register of doctors who can be struck off," said Rashik Parmar MBE, CEO at BCS. "AI professionals already have a big role in our life chances, so why shouldn't they be licensed and registered too?"...

The importance of AI ethics was amplified by the Post Office scandal, says the BCS boss, "where computer generated evidence was used by non-IT specialists to prosecute sub postmasters with tragic results."

For anyone not aware of the outrageous wrongdoing committed by the Post Office, it bought the bug-ridden Horizon accounting system in 1999 from ICL, a company that was subsequently bought by Fujitsu. Hundreds of local Post Office branch managers were subsequently wrongfully convicted of fraud when Horizon was to blame."

Privacy By Design Is Important For Every Area Of Your Business; Forbes, April 10, 2018

Heidi Maher, Forbes; Privacy By Design Is Important For Every Area Of Your Business

"The only solution -- the only way to change people’s behavior -- is to embed privacy in the very fabric of the organization. That’s why Privacy by Design, a decades-old application design and development strategy, is now being discussed as a foundational strategy for entire organizations...

Finally, the use of new technologies is evolving so fast it creates significant legal complexity. Who is at fault when an accident involves a self-driving car? Who can access the data collected by a fitness tracker or medical device implant?

While we may not be able to untangle all the legal and regulatory questions yet, we can do a better job of protecting the data. The seven original principles of Privacy by Design -- developed for software engineers by the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada, the Dutch Data Protection Authority, and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research – suggest the path forward..."

Computer science faces an ethics crisis. The Cambridge Analytica scandal proves it.; Boston Globe, March 22, 2018

Yonatan Zunger, Boston Globe; 

Computer science faces an ethics crisis. The Cambridge Analytica scandal proves it.

"Software engineers continue to treat safety and ethics as specialities, rather than the foundations of all design; young engineers believe they just need to learn to code, change the world, disrupt something. Business leaders focus on getting a product out fast, confident that they will not be held to account if that product fails catastrophically. Simultaneously imagining their products as changing the world and not being important enough to require safety precautions, they behave like kids in a shop full of loaded AK-47’s...

Underpinning all of these need to be systems for deciding on what computer science ethics should be, and how they should be enforced. These will need to be built by a consensus among the stakeholders in the field, from industry, to academia, to capital, and most importantly, among the engineers and the public, who are ultimately most affected. It must be done with particular attention to diversity of representation. In computer science, more than any other field, system failures tend to affect people in different social contexts (race, gender, class, geography, disability) differently. Familiarity with the details of real life in these different contexts is required to prevent disaster...

What stands between these is attention to the core questions of engineering: to what uses might a system be put? How might it fail? And how will it behave when it does? Computer science must step up to the bar set by its sister fields, before its own bridge collapse — or worse, its own Hiroshima."