Computers and Philosophy Conference 2003 Australia
Don Gotterbarn
Professor of Software Engineering
Ethics
Auckland University of Technology , New Zealand gotterba@etsu.edu
From 31 October to November 2003 the first Computers and Philosophy (CaP) Conference in the southern hemisphere was held in Canberra Australia . For several years CaP conferences were held at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States but now have included an international venue. In 2003 there were CaP conference in Australia and the UK . The CaP conference goal is to bring together participants with a broad range of interests at the intersections of computing and philosophy. The conference included paper on such subjects as: artificial intelligence, the philosophy of interface design, ways to use computers to teach computer ethics and to teach symbolic logic, the philosophy of computation, and the philosophy of information. Countries represented by presenters included: Australia , China , Japan , South Africa , Texas , Thailand , United Kingdom , and the United States ,
This issue of Computers and Society includes six papers from the conference that are of particular interest to the readers of Computers and Society . The papers represent those from the conference which focus on ethical issues faced at the interface of technology and society. The authors of these papers are Yeslam Al-Saggaf and John Weckert (Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Canberra), Erik M. Champion (Department of Geomatics, Melbourne), L Pretorius, A. Barnard and E. Cloete (School of Computing, University of South Africa), Richard Lucas (Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga), Gregor Urbas (Faculty of Law, Australian National University), and Kay Mathiesen (Department of Philosophy, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts).
The growth of the Internet has had a variety of positive and negative impacts on society. There are headline grabbing impacts in the areas of pornography and privacy and piracy. Less attention, however, gets paid to the impact of the globalization of ideas on diverse cultures. The presumption is that the Internet's dispersal of ideas across all cultures is good, while some cultures refer to the Internet as another technological imperialism of the West. The paper by Al-Saggaf and Weckert uses empirical data to examine the impact of this globalization on the social and cultural transformations taking place in Saudi Arabia . They use a constructivist approach because, they argue, religion and culture in Saudi Arabia not only shape people's attitudes, practices, and behaviors, but also shape the way they see and do things and perceive their lives.
Sometimes the positive potential of the Internet is underestimated or denied because of the narrowness of our focus or because of the model used to interpret and model the Internet. Hubert Dreyfus has been actively addressing philosophical issues of computing for over 20 years. His recently published work On the Internet , presents his theory of the allowable functions of the Internet. Using this work as a starting point Eric Champion develops a theory of philosophical and social implications of the Internet; especially focusing on the adequacy of using the analogy of the press to describe the Internet. He highlights some significant areas of philosophical discussion about the Internet.
The previous two papers describe issues on a macro-level involving the Internet in large social settings and its affect on cultures. The underlying elements which compose the Internet and facilitate its providing useful services also have surprising impacts. Pretorius, Barnard and Cloete identify a set of issues with the strange world of Internet agents. These agents seem benign in that they are designed to accommodate Internet user's needs, but because some of them are invested with ‘intelligence' and work together in multi-agent communities where they pursue specific goals, the organization of their ‘social' structure raises obvious security issues and some surprising ethical issues. It is important for an Internet developer to understand these potential issues, the places in the design process the issues are most likely to appear, and then to design accordingly. Pretorius (et al.) identify ethical issues subsumed in the design of these mobile agents and offer suggestions for a more ethical design of them in accordance with Moor's concept of “just consequentialism”
Richard Lucas in “Moral Theories for Autonomous Software Agents,” takes a different approach to the issue of autonomous software agents. Rather than investigating how to mitigate their ethical impact through careful design, Lucas asks about the possibility of moral responsibility of the agents themselves. He argues that any current description of these agents should not characterize them as ethical. He then looks at what would be necessary for an ethical theory to characterize the actions of autonomous agents as responsible and ethical. These standards are combined to form what he calls ‘Artificial ethics'. He examines two possible models for ‘artificial ethics'.
The Pretorious, et. al paper develops an approach to design by working with Moor's just consequentialism, while Lucas investigates the moral theories which can apply to these questions by developing a concept of ‘artificial ethical' which is designed to apply to these autonomous agents.
In addition to dealing with specific Internet issue, conference speakers addressed broader issues. Gregor Urbas addresses the Criminalizing of Computer Misconduct. Various activities have been considered inappropriate computer behavior. Only recently have legislatures tried to address these misbehaviors by developing laws. Urbas focuses on these laws in terms of their enactment across national boundaries and the inconsistent philosophical concerns behind such legislations. This paper is also interesting in the light of the previous Internet papers. How do the problems identified by Urbas relate to ‘misconduct' and the impacts pointed out by Al-Saggaf and Weckert, and how do they relate to the obligations of developers who know of the issues identified by Pretorius?
In the concluding paper Mathiesen presents her theory of ‘information ethics' which she argues can address all of the issues of computer ethics. Using the concept of ‘access states' she shows how information ethics can have a “foundation independent of an ethics of computing and computers” and address all the issues of computer ethics. She then uses this framework to evaluate positions by Floridi and van den Hoven.
