A presentation at Isle of Ruby 2018 in in Exeter, UK by Jayne Mast
The Reasonable Developer Paul Verbeek-Mast Front-end Developer @ Werkspot
Content warnings Detailed description of sexual assault Image of raw meat Image of Mark Zuckerberg
“I’m just an engineer.”
– Tom Lehrer (in ‘Wernher von Braun’) “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?”
The Reasonable Developer Paul Verbeek-Mast Front-end Developer @ Werkspot
Reasonable having sound judgement; fair and sensible
Normal distribution & standard deviation L’Homme Moyen (The Average Man)
! "
$ Menlove Vaughan % % % % % %
did he behave like an ordinary, reasonable man?
The Legal Village & ' ( ) * + reasonable person reasonable o ! cer ordinary prudent man of business reasonable hairdresser fair-minded and informed observer
“Fitbit helped expose woman's false rape claim in Lancaster County” http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/04/watch_today_segment_on_how_fit.html
https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/692004889380179968
“The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good . It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned” – Andrew Bosworth, VP @ Facebook https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data
Ethical dilemmas
are everywhere
What is your product when it’s “free”
to use?
What is “safe enough” ?
How much effort should we put into preventing misuse ?
Should I fix this bug?
How much
harm
can
this bug cause?
What are we sharing back to the community?
Would you write code that’s
clearly unethical
?
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#ethics
No
Depends on
what it is
Yes
58.5%
36.6%
4.8%
Would you
report
unethical code?
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#ethics
Depends on
what it is
Yes, but only
within the company
Yes, and publicly
46.6%
35.7%
13.1%
No
4.6%
Who is ultimately most
responsible
?
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#ethics
Upper management
The person who
came up with the idea
The developer
who wrote it
57.5%
22.8%
19.7%
Do developers have an obligation to
consider the
ethical implications
of their code?
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#ethics
Yes
Unsure /
I don't know
No
79.6%
14.3%
6.1%
Reasonable Developer 1. Does not write code that’s clearly unethical; 2. Reports any unethical code; 3. Holds upper management responsible for accomplishing something unethical; 4. Is obligated to consider ethical implications of their code.
Code of Ethics
ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct 1. Avoid harm; 2. Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing; 3. Be fair and take action not to discriminate; 4. Design and implement systems that are robustly and usably secure. “An ACM member should”
Accept full responsibility for their own work; 2. Be careful to use only accurate data derived by ethical and lawful means, and use it only in ways properly authorized; 3. Avoid associations with businesses and organizations which are in conflict with this code. ACM Software Engineering Code “A software engineer should”
ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-code-of-ethics-and- professional-conduct
ACM Software Engineering Code (with IEEE) https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-code/ IEEE Code of Ethics
https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html
What if you encounter ethical problems?
What is the problem exactly?
Who is affected?
What are the internal procedures?
What are the alternative actions?
ICAEW framework for resolving ethical problems https://www.icaew.com/technical/ethics/framework-for- resolving-ethical-problems
Santa Clara University framework for ethical decision making https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision- making/a-framework-for-ethical-decision-making/
Ethics is an integral part of software development
Don’t just act reasonable. Act responsible.
Create your own code of ethics, and live by it
You are not
“just an engineer”
Thank you
Paul Verbeek-Mast @paul_v_m Front-end developer @ Werkspot
In the early 1800’s, a Belgian astronomer came up with the definition of ‘L’homme moyen’, the average man. The studies he did on what he called ‘social physics’, the way the average person behaves, is still being used in legal trials today. They use it to determine whether someone’s action was reasonable. Today, they not only have The Average Man, but a whole ‘legal village’ with characters like ‘The Reasonable Hairdresser’. Each to determine if a specific type of person has acted in a “normal” way.
This got me thinking. Now that we are making machines that have to make ethical decisions, like self-driving cars, when will the first legal case against a developer happen?
They are going to have to define a ‘reasonable developer’ to determine if the decisions they made and the code they produced were reasonable at the time of writing the code. Who would this Reasonable Developer be?
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
Here’s what was said about this presentation on social media.
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