AUTHOR
Frank W Connolly

PUBLISHED IN
Science and Engineering Ethics (1996) 2, 2, pp 167-176

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the relationship between ethics, technology and law, and the roles and limitations each has in this relationship. It argues that ethics has the key role in establishing a resilient, comprehensive and sensitive information infrastructure. It puts forward a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities for the electronic community.

AUTHOR
Simon G. Davies

ABSTRACT

Information Technology (IT) involves a range of costs and vulnerabilities, both to the institutions that use it, and to society in general. Recent experience indicates that the negative influences of IT – and even the mere perception of negative effects – will be accepted by any community to only a limited extent. Beyound this point, constraints will be externally applied to regulate the IT industry. In order to avoid costly and intrusive regulatory controls, the IT industry must move quickly to assess its impact on society. It must then develop and apply practicable and enforceable ethical principles based on a new relevant ethical matrix. This paper explores the variety of negative influences of IT, the forces which will ultimately constrain the industry, and the steps which may be taken to cope with these.

AUTHOR
Richard G. Platt and Bruce Morrison

ABSTRACT

In the late sixties, the Advanced Research Projects Agency founded Arpanet, a network originally designed as a testbed for computer telecommunications applications and technologies. While initially allowing only about sixty sites, the introduction of new protocols and LAN technology allowed the Net, now known as the Internet, to grow dramatically. This growth-rate has been at times as high as twenty-five percent a month. With this dramatic expansion has come the inevitable growing pains. In its original form, the Internet was, as one Internet expert put it:

“both relatively small and remarkably homogenous – well educated, technologically sophisticated, and united by general agreement on what the Internet was good for and what was good for the Internet (Chapin 1994).”

Such an atmosphere, while perfectly matched to the original mission of the INternet, has run into ethical and social dilemmas that need to be solved if the Internet is to evolve into, or serve as a guide for the National Information Infrastructure that is being discussed by so many these days. Amidst all the praise and excitement are voices that, while no less enamored of the potential, are just as concerned with the more difficult aspects that the concept brings with it. While issues such as privacy aren’t as glamorouse as virtual reality or multimedia, if they aren’t dealt with now, the opportunities may never come to fruition.

In his 1986 article “Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age,” Richard Mason pointed out four areas of ethical concern that were emerging due to new technology in the information sciences. While not specifically mentioning the Internet, which at the time was the little-known, exclusive club mentioned above, the issues he discussed are very much current with the situations the NII is facing today. Mason represented his four main ethical issues with the acronym PAPA. These were privacy, accuracy, property, and access (Mason 1986). Using this framework for current issues on the Internet, some logic can be brought to what has previously been considered a wild-west, frontier justice situation.

AUTHOR
Duncan Langford

ABSTRACT

In this paper I discuss a framework for the establishment of Research Ethics Committees for computer science research and development. Also addressed are some suggested guidelines for committee membership, potential areas of activity, and general powers. It is not intended that these proposals should be viewed as either comprehensive or incapable of further improvement; the purpose of the paper is to stimulate discussion by offering suggestions.

AUTHOR
Marc Demarest

ABSTRACT

Having exhausted the economic benefits of the automation of production work, and already committed to their strategies with respect to the automation of service work, commercial firms are now turning their strategic attention to knowledge management and the automation of knowledge work. These firms will adopt one of two generic approaches to process and workflow-based IT automation of knowledge work: empowerment or control. The firms’ strategic decision will be made not on the basis of market sector or segment, as has been the case in the past, but on the strategic basis of competition: design-centered process inovation, or cost-centered price or product leadership. Design-centered firms will select empowerment paradigms for the IT-based automation of knowledge work. This paper examines this strategic bifurcation, and outlines directions for IT ethicists committed to empowerment paradigms.

AUTHOR
Niki Panteli and Martin Corbett

PUBLISHED IN
ETHICOMP Journal Vol 1 Issue 1

ABSTRACT

There is a long-standing debate in the organisational behaviour and information technology (IT) literatures concerning the relationship between new technology and the design of shopfloor and office work. One influential strand of this debate, popularised by the work of Harry Braverman (1974), opines that the introduction of new technology leads to a deskilling of users. In recent years a different, seemingly oppositional, stance has been taken by other researchers. These writers point to the potential of new technology to empower (i.e. enskill) users. This paper briefly reviews this deskilling versus empowerment debate and examines the issues in more depth by means of two short case studies. The paper concludes with a critical examination of the concept of empowerment and argues that, in practice, deskilling and empowerment do not constitute mutually exclusive concepts or trends.