Related papers: The Case for Anticipating Undesirable Consequences…
Computer science research has led to many breakthrough innovations but has also been scrutinized for enabling technology that has negative, unintended consequences for society. Given the increasing discussions of ethics in the news and…
Our society has been increasingly witnessing a number of negative, unintended consequences of digital technologies. While post-hoc policy regulation is crucial in addressing these issues, reasonably anticipating the consequences before…
Recent years have seen increased awareness of the potential significant impacts of computing technologies, both positive and negative. This whitepaper explores how to address possible harmful consequences of computing technologies that…
The computing research community needs to work much harder to address the downsides of our innovations. Between the erosion of privacy, threats to democracy, and automation's effect on employment (among many other issues), we can no longer…
Digital technologies have positively transformed society, but they have also led to undesirable consequences not anticipated at the time of design or development. We posit that insights into past undesirable consequences can help…
A recent normative turn in computer science has brought concerns about fairness, bias, and accountability to the core of the field. Yet recent scholarship has warned that much of this technical work treats problematic features of the status…
Technology has advanced dramatically in the previous several years. There are also cyber assaults. Cyberattacks pose a possible danger to information security and the general public. Since data practice and internet consumption rates…
Journalists, public policy analysts, and economists have called attention to the growing importance that high-performance and scientific computing have to national security and industrial leadership. As computing continues to power…
Computing is an indispensable component of nearly all technologies and is ubiquitous for vast segments of society. It is also essential to discoveries and innovations in most disciplines. However, while past grand challenges in science have…
Women are underrepresented in Computer Science disciplines at all levels, from undergraduate and graduate studies to participation and leadership in academia and industry. Increasing female representation in the field is a grand challenge…
In the past several years, scientists have issued a series of warnings about the threats of climate change and other forms of environmental disruption. Here, we provide a scientists' warning on how technology affects these issues.…
Recently, a lot of attention has been given to undesired consequences of Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as unfair bias leading to discrimination, or the lack of explanations of the results of AI systems. There are several important…
Great advances in computing and communication technology are bringing many benefits to society, with transformative changes and financial opportunities being created in health care, transportation, education, law enforcement, national…
Making conjectures about future consequences of a technology is an exercise in trying to reduce various forms of uncertainty. Both to produce and reason about these conjectures requires understanding their potential limitations. In other…
Scientific investigation procedures have been evolving to follow an ever-changing cultural landscape, the sophistication of the technology available and an ever-growing knowledge base. This continuous evolution brought investigation…
Modern society is permeated with computers, and the software that controls them can have latent, long-term, and immediate effects that reach far beyond the actual users of these systems. This places researchers in Computer Science and…
Computing devices are vital to all areas of modern life and permeate every aspect of our society. The ubiquity of computing and our reliance on it has been accelerated and amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. From education to work…
Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of…
A negative result is when the outcome of an experiment or a model is not what is expected or when a hypothesis does not hold. Despite being often overlooked in the scientific community, negative results are results and they carry value.…
Technological advances of virtually every kind pose risks to society including fairness and bias. We review a long-standing wisdom that a widespread practical deployment of any technology may produce adverse side effects misusing the…