Code Fellows Reading Notes

442

Ethics in the workplace

This article addresses the relationship between a company, the employees, and the projects the company chooses to work on. In this specific instance, it talks about how Google handles censorship on their platforms in China. Employees and human rights groups have criticized Google for taking part in these practices.

In a healthy work environment, I do believe the opinion of the employees is something that needs to be considered. Even before that, I believe that tech companies with these large platforms should also be held to account for the choices they make, by their employees, the public, and the law; society suffers when shareholders & profit are allowed to be the most important metric.

Ethics in Technology

This article covers the new areas of concern as we approach a reality where we surrender control of our cars to a computer system. When you get behind the wheel of a car, you are accepting liability for any damage that happens as a result of your driving. What happens to that liability when a self-driving system takes over, and how are the decisions made when the car finds itself in a bad situation?

It makes sense that companies don’t want to comment on these decisions with their self-driving systems, but they need to be forced to be transparent if they’re being trusted with these responsibilities. Work needs to be done to ensure the right questions and topics are being addressed in an open dialogue. If you leave this entirely up to these companies, then you are making the choice to deal with these problems after an accident happens.