Hi, everyone.
Thank you so much for coming here today, and a big shout out to the organisers for putting
this event together.
I'm very honoured to get to be on this stage and talk to you about some really serious
stuff.
In 2016, the most pressing topic of the year for software engineers was empathy, and, in
2017, the topic of the year was inclusion, and, this year, the topic seems to be about
ethics, which I'm really excited about, because the discourse grows more and more concerning
each day.
Even though these issues feel like new wounds, they have a long history steeped in bias,
and systemic oppression, and we need to pay attention to these things.
Data and society research institute recently hosted Author Algorithms of Oppression, talking
about technological red lining.
Noble reflected at the event on her upbringing in Fresno, California.
She recalls seeing the KKK in public, the sun set curfew on black people, the black
poor side of town was a food desert which meant there were no grocery stores at all.
With no buses serving the town, it meant there was a huge burden placed on the poor and the
black people of Fresno, California.
Her talking about that history and having grown newspaper that environment, and how
it shaped her to be the person who she was and pushed her to do the research that she
did to publish the book Algorithms of Oppression, reminded me about the forgotten New York City
of neighbourhood of Manhattan Town.
In 1905, the colour line was broken in Colombia University when he began purchasing real estate
on upper 99th Street and then between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West.
There were a lot of notable resident of Manhattan town, including some of the most venerated
artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.
One of my trivia facts was that Sadie Fagin, the mother of Billie Holliday ran a cafe called
Mom Holidays, where she got in an argument with Billie wanting to borrow money, and that's
when she came up with the title of the song God Bless The Child.
By 19 inform the 1955, those two blocks were nothing but rubble.
In 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act which gave Robert Moses in his
position as Chairman of the New York City Selenium committee, the power to condemn building
and steal land under the guise of urban renewal.
He would grant the land to companies of his choosing, often as a way to amass political
favour.
Manhattan Town was literally the very first neighbourhood that Moses picked to do this
to.
Residents of Manhattan Town were evicted in 1951, the buildings were torn down, and most
of it was just rubble until the 1960s when the Park West Village Apartments were built.
Moses did irrevocable social I don't economic damage by forcing more than 300,000 families
out of their home in the name of urban renewal.
Here you can see on maps, the two blocks are gone, and in their place are the Park West
Apartments and a Whole Foods Markets.
We talk about displacement of people through gentrification.
In April of this year, Saheed Vassell was killed by the New York Police Department as
a consequence of gentrification.
And tech has been responsible for all the gentrification of all of San Francisco, and
made it easy for the culture neighbourhoods, Little Havana in Miami, and much of Brooklyn
and New York, to be digitally erased by prioritising commonly search terms that gain prominence.
When we use Google to search for things, we teach those machines that that is the priority,
and, since many times low-income people don't have access, they don't have a need to Google
for something, that means, when there is more attention paid to a neighbourhood, when gentrification
starts happening, the software we are writing is backing that up.
So, algorithms with the help of machine-learning are not objective.
They're instilled with the biases by the people who write them, when measures are not taken
to consider the consequences of disruption.
This is why we need to apply more scrutiny when it comes to whether or not the features
we push as software are ethical.
Satre's theory of existentialism dictates that humans creates their own values and determine
their meaning to their life.
For Satre, once an oppressive situation is regarded as such by those who feel oppressed,
the situation becomes intolerable.
We are then compelled to project our intentions on to our present condition and transform
them into action.
And because ethical dilemmas disproportionately affect under represented minorities, it is
important to take the time to listen to us instead of assuming what we need.
Some of the most pressing dilemmas right now are surrounding the issues of privacy, surveillance,
data, and discrimination.
Of course, we've all heard about the way that Cambridge Analytica unethically used Facebook's
data, but there are even more serious things happening right now, especially in the United
States.
The Stop LED Spying Coalition recently released a report about the harassment and mistreatment
of low-income black people due to the use of predictive policing software by Palantir
that they sold to the LAPD and nearly sold to the New York Police Department.
Amazon is trying to get into the predictive policing with product recognition.
It has the power to recognise people in large groups of people and crowded events and public
places, and they include race as an identifier which results in increased bias.
None of these issues are new.
In 2016, Pro Publica uncovered bias, in the Compass software, correctional management
profiling for alternative sanctions, and it is used by courts to automatically determine
if sentencing based on criminal recidivism scores set by questions that have extreme
bias, against low-income black people, so how do we prevent this kind of discrimination?
How do we prevent our software from ending people's lives?
We need to agree on what the ethical foundation of our work is in this industry, in the workplace,
and in the world.
In 1985, James Moore detailed in his essay What Is Computer Ethics, these four tenets.
It's important to apply these to the workplace and ask these questions when we talk about
machine-learning, AI, and data collection, just to name a few.
According to Professor Margaret Ann Pierce, she defined the need for the following three
ethical influences: an individual personal code, an informal code of ethics, and - I'm
sorry - an informal code of ethics, and a code of ethics in the workplace.
Because, unlike our code, we can't say that we were only taking orders.
Or, as it was been called, rationalising in the way of the little - I like to remember,
when we talk about ethics, the root Greek word is "ethos" which translates to "habit"
or "custom", and that is the key to developing an ethical framework, because we need to be
accountable.
We need to make it a habit; we need to make it a custom.
In the essay Moral Machines, they wrote about how machine ethics were drive advancement
in human ethics but forcing us to address gaps in modern normative theories of ethics.
This is our moral imperative.
It is our job to consider the ways that our actions are shaping the ethical world.
Here are some organisations with their own form al codes.
Right how in the United States, the only CS programmes that require ethics are the ones
that are ABET accredited, but the Association For Computer Machinery - ACM - is considered
one of the most appropriate for web development.
I urge you all to look up all six of these, and pick one.
Apply it to your work.
Apply it to the decisions that you make.
Practising ethical decision-making in the workplace is about stretching your imagination.
The EFF recently published a science fiction story by Corey Doctrau to consider the sections
of 12.01 of the DMCA and how, coming down hard on copyright infringement, will change
society.
It is important not just to think about these issues, it's important that we act on them.
If you remember Robert Moses, the man who basically pushed all of those people out of
Manhattanville, his legacy was extremely far reaching.
He was a big fan of the automobile, and he wanted to build a highway that would run right
down the middle of Washington Square Park, and carve up the middle of the park, carve
up the middle of the neighbourhood, and just send trucks and cars right down the middle
of the neighbourhood, because he felt innovation in automobiles was more important than the
lives of the people in the communities.
He was also making a lot of money for a lot of other people, and felt that that was more
important than the people who were living in these homes.
But, he was stopped.
Washington Square Park, if you've ever been there, has no highway running through it,
and that's because of this person.
This is Jane Jacobs.
She was a writer.
She most notably published a book called The death and Life of Great American Cities, and
she was an activist in New York City.
When Robert Moses came to that neighbourhood, when he came to Washington Square Park, Jane
Jacobs organised the people of the neighbourhood and put together activism to keep Robert Moses
from enacting his plan.
Jane Jacobs was really good at the photo op.
She put moms with strollers in the middle of the park to protest, and she had a ribbon
re-tying ceremony in the park to mock Moses' ribbon-cutting ceremony that he would do when
he opened new highways and bridges, about and because she rallied all of these people
and participated in civil disobedience, got arrested for protesting at city hearings,
the mayor was forced to stop these plans that Robert Moses had to build a highway through
the middle of the park.
What ended up happening was he went on and he tried to continue to do this, and, as he
continued to try to do this in other neighbourhoods, tried to carve the middle of Canal Street
down in New York City, and Jane Jacobs came back and pushed him down, they kept and got
to maintain the living that they already had.
They were able to defend themselves, and, we recently saw this happen too in our industry,
because just yesterday, Google - Gizmodo reported Google will not be renewing their contract
for Project Maven with the DOD because the actions employees took.
A dozen employees resigned, signed paperwork saying they didn't believe that this was analytical
decision, didn't want to participate in writing AI software for drones, and, because of this,
just like the civil disobedience and the activism of Jane Jacobs, we, too, can have an effect
on our industry.
Companies are willing to ... [Applause].
Consider how much money companies are willing to pay to get our attention.
How much money they're willing to pay us in salaries; how much money they're spending
to sponsor conferences just like this one.
We have power over them as a collective group, and we need to - it's our moral imperative
to use that power for good and not for evil, and we need to come up with an ethical framework
to do that that is more explicit than just good versions evil.
We need to decide on codes of ethics, the same way that we decide on codes of conduct
for our conferences.
Codes of conduct are just ethical - codes of ethics that we apply to our internal group.
It is deciding the ways that we want to treat the people in our society.
So we need to apply the same kind of codes to our work and the world at large.
[Applause].
It's our job to design computers, to design phones, to design software, in a way that
no-one dies, and to consider the historical, global, political, social, and economic repercussions
of the work that we do.
I want to encourage each and every one of you to consider the ways that you can make
your work more ethical, the ways that you can prevent people from being harmed by the
software that you write, whether it be through gentrification in maps, through AI having
bias, in machine-learning, or even on your team, when the team-mates are the subject
of their own oppression.
What are you doing with your power to help the people who you work with and the people
of the world at large?
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards before you have to be brave, you have
to take that responsibility on yourself.
Thank you.
[Cheering and Applause].