 All right, so now I want to welcome you are an ex keynote speaker It's Catherine Jermul first time I saw Catherine was actually online on Videos recorded at PyCon US where she was talking about web scraping and data mangling And I really loved her talks finally we we got to know each other actually in the bill bow in 2015 and As you know, like she's an author. She wrote a book on data mangling on a Riley. She does video courses She's a he's one of the organizers of pie data Berlin. She's a very active member of our community and now She's going to talk about ethics and data. Oh, no, sorry. You're basically also like your European basic law She was born in LA, but you're in Berlin since three years three and a half so and Yeah, so and today she's going to talk about ethics and Ethics and data. Um, so this is not a technical keynote Ethics here, so I want to welcome give you a very warm welcome to Catherine and Thank you for being here. I know there was quite a fun social event last night So I appreciate you getting up early and joining us And I want to thank all of the organizing committee for organizing such a great conference and also inviting me to be here Today I'm going to talk about a topic that is quite controversial in some circles Now ethics might be something that you learned about in school It might be something that you even debate on the world stage or when you talk about politics with your friends But it's not often that in the work that we do every day. We get into ethical conversations But I wonder if it should be I Myself work as a data scientist and I myself face these types of ethical conversations often when I'm building models or when I'm thinking about how we use data and Because of this I think that perhaps us even as a larger computing field even if you don't work with data Perhaps this is something that we should be talking about So what we'll do today is I'm going to take you through some of the history of computing with an ethical focus so we're going to take a look at Important moments in computing history and some of the ethical reasoning behind them To begin with we will start with an IBM advertisement from 1960. Oops. Sorry All right, we'll actually move forward Because in the interest of time and in the interest of all of your time What this is an advertisement for and what it goes on to explain is the sage system and this system is a Satellite air system and what it is supposedly doing is Tracking all of the aircraft over the United States and its goal is To have these people these intelligence workers to be able to click on a screen at these unknown Aircrafts and then fire missiles at them and destroy them midair Therefore protecting the United States from quote-unquote Soviet attack This was a system that was designed by a lot of intelligent computer scientists A lot of people that were building IBM's best computers at the time in the late 50s and early 60s And when I saw this advertisement, I mean, it's quite over the top I will have to post it later so you can look at it yourself But I wondered what the computer scientists who are working on this machine thought I Wonder if perhaps they were at all concerned ethically about their creation and In testing actually this sage system was wholly ineffective In one test called operation sky shield it would have only neutralized 25% of targets leaving 75% of missiles incoming and to whatever devastation they were able to make and So I wonder if when they saw this advertisement and it it's made to seem like I you're completely safe and secure because we have a Computer and the computer will take care of it all I wonder what the computer scientists actually thought the computer engineers who are building this system and I wonder if they were concerned with how it was marketed and if they were concerned about failure So this is a constant problem in computing computing has been touched by the military has been touched by state Intelligence systems in a lot of ways throughout history the first computer scientists and mathematician will look at is no but Vina and No, but Vina was famous statistician in his time and he worked with Neurologist and other mathematicians to help discover some of the ways that our brain sends electricity So this was when we were first discovering how electrical signals travel through the brain and when we were first discovering neural networks and He also did some statistics for the military In fact his work went on to contribute to the minimal mean squared estimator Which essentially allows us to estimate for he used it for flight paths for missile defense So he himself worked with the military he himself probably had his own ethical qualms But his seminal work is a book called cybernetics and he was actually one of the first to coin this term This is this idea of using computers as an aid to help us make decisions and In cybernetics. He has a quote that I think is important to share today I'll read a slightly longer version than we have here. I Have said that this new development computers has unbounded possibilities for good and for evil It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor Although unlike slave labor it does not involve the direct and moralizing effects of human cruelty However any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor and is essentially slave labor The key word of this statement is competition It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks Or it may not. I do not know When I read this quote and I realized that it was written in 1948 I was a bit surprised that I don't feel like we've moved much further along in the conversation I feel like this quote could be shared in an article today in a blog post today in any type of news today as we debate Automation and jobs The people in our field we work to automate tasks away. Sometimes we work on systems that will entirely replace an industry and Therefore are we then responsible for the degrading of lives that happens when that occurs Perhaps it's better that nobody has to be a factory worker or that nobody has to drive a taxi if they don't want to or be a truck driver and so forth But what does it mean? Is it the tyranny of the few? Is it perhaps those of us that can automate away things and the societies that can afford to automate away things versus those that perhaps can't and And if those other societies or if other nations can't keep up Does this mean that they're essentially competing against these robots against this as he so-called slave labor? The next mathematician that will look at and great computer scientist is Joseph Weissenbaum Now Weissenbaum was essentially a contemporary He was a German Jew and he was born in Berlin His family escaped Nazi persecution by emigrating to the United States and he grew up and was educated primarily there He became a professor at MIT in the 1960s and you might know of his work because he built Elizabot So for those of you familiar with natural language processing or perhaps you've just heard about it The Elizabot was probably the first chatbot and it used natural language patterns to essentially mimic human speech and act as a therapist Now Weissenbaum was also famous in his own right for some other inventions that he did in fact this is a photo of him at Dezeit and In 1965 and he's demonstrating remote login to his MIT machine Weissenbaum was Came to become quite active politically within his time and He actively worked to challenge those around him on these ethical and political concerns that he had I think he felt it especially important given his family's history to talk about ethics in computing and what he saw around him and He began to question whether AI and Computer science were a force of good in the world This is a quote from an interview in an MIT publication in 1985 Where I feel like he was particularly candid about his feelings about computing I'll again read a longer quote. I Think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force It has made possible the saving of institutions pretty much as they were which otherwise might have had to be changed for example banking Superficially it looks as if banking has been revolutionized by the computer, but only very superficially Considered that say 20 25 years ago the banks were faced with the fact that the population was growing at a very rapid rate Many more checks would be written than before Their response was to bring in the computer By the way, I helped design the first computer banking system in the United States for the Bank of America 25 years ago Now if it had not been for the computer if the computer had not been invented, what would the banks have had to do? They might have had to decentralize or they might have to regionalize in some way in other words It might have been necessary to introduce a social invention Not just a technical invention and this quote for me brought me pause as Somebody that aims to make unmanageable tasks manageable I aim to make data clean and accessible to use large and disparate data sets to make inferences or determine some sort of meaning or signal Am I helping? consolidate power By doing the job with maybe 30 lines and a sci-kit learn import by doing the job that perhaps would be Very untenable take quite a long time or maybe even impossible Am I therefore helping consolidate this power? Am I using? technology to thwart social progress. I don't know the answer to this, but these are the types of questions I'd love to hear your feedback on Moving on throughout history. We have old Johan Dahl and Christian Nagad They're essentially the fathers of object-oriented programming. So we have them to think Simula one and Simula 67 the languages that they developed were computer simulation languages they were used to simulate physics in a military laboratory and Christian Nagad here on the right Was a staunch leftist and activist throughout his entire life. In fact, he eventually identified as a socialist In his belief system He of course believed in supporting workers rights And so when he was approached by the Norwegian iron and metal workers union to help them build a system So that their jobs would not be automated away and instead they would learn computing skills he jumped at the opportunity and He was able to work with them and build what many people think is the first example of participatory design one which The active participants or users or workers are able to help make the design process and able to help Determine what the system looks like and He essentially helped them build an operations research type of scheduler and backlog organizer for the union He was also quite famous for walking away from military work in 1960 he quit his job at the defense research in Norway and Took several of his teammates with him He often joked that because of that he had the most funding request rejections out of any person in Norway He gave a speech at the iris conference, which is a group of Scandinavian researchers that meet and I'll read a slightly longer quote from it You need a self-defense against yourself and the temptations to choose a comfortable but wrong way out in critical situations But compromises may be necessary The greatest danger then is not the acceptance of a dubious compromise, but in not being cynical and honest about it Your mental processes will try to justify your actions to yourself making the compromise the desired solution And you will change yourself if you're not honest and astute Bo Dalbum asked me to talk about the iron and metal project. Why many people don't know about it properly he said and Some have forgotten those aspects that ought to disturb them as their environment pushes them slowly to the right Perhaps I should ask some questions to those in the audience who believe that they have been influenced by the project and its successors Has anyone resented the content of your work recently? If not, what is your excuse? Have you had any real conflict in your research activities lately or does such conflicts only belong to your now romanticized glorious radical past? Will your recent research to any extent increase the power to influence their own fate for people with whom you feel solidarity? He went on to quip that he's joking a bit But I think the message remains clear If we're building systems tools Algorithms and so forth if we're building these and they actively work against our politics against our ethics against our morality However, it is you choose to make valuable decisions in your life if we do that Why are we doing that and if we choose instead to build tools and systems that we believe Support our politics that we believe support our ethics and we distribute them Can we be then a form of justice? Can we therefore spread instead of spreading? Let's say something we don't believe in can we therefore become a way to spread something that we do believe in or As he suggests are we just constantly perhaps making compromises? And do we need to be very honest with ourselves about the compromises that we are making? Andrei Urshoff is a prominent figure in Soviet era computer science and cybernetics He works on numerous inventions along the same time working in parallel and often Collaborating with several computer scientists in the United States and the UK He's actually famous for likely writing the first optimizing compiler for a language. That's more complex than Fortran He wrote this for the alpha language that he worked on and He was a really big proponent of education In fact, he's probably the first computer scientist to talk about computer literacy he built several schools during his time he appropriated funding for them and this for example is a photo at the USSR Academy of Sciences during a summer school for young programmers His belief in teaching and in learning and that being an important part of computer science is Really espoused in his speech titled aesthetics and the human factor in programming which he gave at a 1972 computer conference in the United States. I'll read the full quote of which only a part is showed here In past ages the ability to read and write was considered a rare God-given talent gift The destiny of a limited group of the specially chosen in The present age of general literacy we perceive reading to be a universally attainable accomplishment But we are tempted to single out a new elite group who become arbiters between the lay Generality of mankind and the arcane informational model of the world hidden in the machine Is it not however the highest aesthetic idea of our profession to make the art of programming public property and thereby to submerge our elite exclusiveness within a mature mankind Indeed, I feel like Urshav approaches these ethical problems slightly differently than some of his Western contemporaries His idea is not do we hold some power that we should then further hone for good or for evil His point is should we even hold this power at all? Should everyone learn to code? Should everyone learn how a computer works literally on the inside not just how to turn it on and off and If not does our own understanding of computers does our own ability to code does for example The data scientists in the room are understanding of statistics and machine learning models Does this give us some special power or privilege? And if it does give us a power or privilege are we an elite and What is what is being part of an elite mean? Doesn't mean we have a responsibility. Does it mean that we have to do things differently? Moving on to the networking era, which is always fun, right? We all love the internet Here you can see the employees at BBN, which is Bolt, Berenick and Newman a Cambridge research firm and BBN won a contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency otherwise known as ARPA and Their project was to build the first computer network in the United States They're seen here in 1969 along with their interface Messaging processor machine, which is essentially the first router and In case you don't know this is the same group that started to create the protocols and the standards that we use in today's internet There's a bunch of amazing engineers and architects that I could talk about in this photo, but I'm gonna focus on two of them Here in blue. I have several on Stein and in yellow. I have Bob Kant Why just talk about the two of them? Well first and foremost because they went on to have longer careers and do quite a lot of work after ARPA net But secondly because they were very outspoken in their political and ethical beliefs and they went in quite different directions So I think it's perhaps a good case study to explore the life of a computer scientist We'll focus on Bob Khan first Bob Khan worked on networks and Essentially networking protocols He along with Vincent surf was able to create the TCP and IP protocols and standards which are mainly unchanged today Which is pretty amazing feet He's essentially a networking genius He went on to build very large networks for the US military at DARPA and then after that he went to IPTO Which is the information processing techniques office Then he heard about this new project brewing in Japan called the fifth generation computer project and This idea was how can we create? True AI thinking machines. How can we create these decision support systems that we might be able to use? at that time he then pitched the idea of the strategic computing initiative of Which this is one of the plans So for the strategic computing initiative you have as you can see at the bottom all of the infrastructure These are the networks that Bob Khan loved This is something that he loves to work on he was able to get quite a lot of funding to just build networks and come up with new networking concepts on Top of that they would then try to build some chips some different hardware designs and eventually working to natural language processing and speech and vision recognition and so forth On top of those technologies they would build autonomous systems pilots associates and battle management and This was all to and I quote Develop a broad base of machine intelligence technology to increase our national security and economic strength So what does this mean? I mean when I first saw this diagram I said well perhaps Bob Khan didn't even know about how his networks would be used Maybe ethically for him. He just really wanted to work on networks. I can understand and appreciate that And then I found a quote from around this era of Bob Khan and It states the nation that dominates this information processing field will possess the keys to world leadership in the 21st century As I began to read more of his writing during the time and writings of his peers at SCI For example Lynn Conway who is a prominent computer scientist in her own right It was clear that they were very well aware of how their programming would be used In fact, it's rumored that the chart that we saw in the last slide that Bob Khan himself designed that pyramid So it's clear that he knew he was building weapons What I wonder is What does it mean when we have to take military funding or let's say corporate funding of corporations Maybe we don't agree with to do our work Does this make us ethically culpable in What the greater process is and If it does make us ethically culpable if something goes wrong, let's say civilians are bombed and so forth Does that make you as the computer scientists or as the data scientists or the machine learning expert? Does it also mean that you are culpable and If you aren't culpable then who is Going back to Bob cons pier several on stein He was a co-worker again and appear at Arpanet and Here we see him with Laura Golt who was a computer scientist and activist as well Severo's work at Arpanet was as lead hardware expert so he built most of the hardware for the first router and Also did some of the software programming He later went on to join Xerox Park and he worked on the Dorado, which was the fastest processor at the time and operating system So around the same time that Bob Khan was petitioning the government for millions of dollars to build weapons Several orange stein and Laura Gould were starting another initiative And this was for a group called computer professionals for social responsibility This is one of the patches that the computer professionals for social responsibility gave out at a joint AI conference most likely the one in Los Angeles in 1985 and Some older folks in the room or perhaps some that knew a little bit of Americana history This is a play on a famous Cold War era advertisement if you will It was a public service announcement that came on and it would say it's 11 p.m. Do you know where your children are and Its goal was to enforce curfew and to make sure that all the young people were inside at night in case of danger Now this play on it is it's 11 p.m. Do you know what your expert system just inferred? and we see the tell-tale mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb and These are the same expert systems that bomb Bob Khan himself was trying to build. I Mean, they they never really came too much right at that time It was very quickly before what we all know now as AI winter and these expert systems were never much more than large statistical models But the fear at the time was that they would be treated as experts was that if the system itself said Okay, we're under attack. It's time to launch the nukes that that is something that would actually happen And that a humid would go about doing it based on this expert system That was a massive concern for CPSR the computer professionals for social responsibility now CPSR was around actually until 2013 and they gave out fairly regular awards actually named Novotvina And highlighting people in the field who are working on social responsibility issues as computer professionals It's a pretty amazing list We've actually covered some of the people on the list But it goes on to talk about whistleblowers and other people who really worked actively to act as an ethical agent But I think what we can really take away from CPSR or what I took away from CPSR is that it was starting this type of activist Conversation amongst computer professionals and it was asking what can we do as people who are concerned about the world that as people Who are concerned about social responsibility? How can we help? How can we be a part of change or part of something that we believe brings justice to the world? And I think that it's quite sad when you read about the history of CPSR that around the time of the personal computing revolution In the mid to late 80s and early 90s. They saw their numbers dwindle and I think one of the problems of this is Computing went from being a social experience in the computer lab working with their peers Chatting probably a lot about these types of issues and theories. It became a personal and a lone experience This was also the time that is often tracked to the gender disparity within our field That's often tracked that the advertisements were all the sudden be a gamer. It's really cool for boys to have computers And so I feel like this was perhaps not intentionally, but unfortunately One of the fatalities of that era was this conversation about computer professionals for social responsibility But CPSR was not the only ones fighting for more professionalism in the field or fighting for us to be having these conversations You might know of Karen Spock Jones. She's quite famous She's a statistical She's a statistician as well as a natural language processing expert and she worked at the Cambridge language research unit on a variety of NLP research Primarily her first forays. I guess are into looking at inferring meaning from the sorry definitions in text You might have also heard of TF IDF term frequency inverse document frequency It's a popular way to extract important words or phrases from a text when you have a larger corpus She wrote the paper that defined the IDF portion of the equation So she's pretty important when it comes to natural language processing, but that's not her only contribution Spock Jones was an outspoken critic of the gender disparities within our field She also was quite a critic of not having some sort of professional code She thought that the growing importance of computers in people's lives meant that we had more and more influence And she was concerned that we didn't have any type of licensing board review that we didn't necessarily have any standards for our own code our own actions I'll again read a slightly longer quote. I Certainly think that professionalism is very important to be a proper professional You need to think about the context and motivation and justifications of what you're doing You don't need a fundamental philosophical discussion every time you put your finger on the keyboard But as computing is spreading so far into people's lives, you need to think about these things I've always felt that once you see how important computing is for life You can't just leave it as a blank box and assume that somebody reasonably competent and relatively benign will do something right with it Her quote again evokes this idea. Who is responsible? If I build a program or write a script or build a model that does something unethical or that can be used unethically Am I responsible for when somebody does that? if I'm not responsible who is as especially machine learning and numerous other fields that we work in as they touch more and more lives as they're used even By legal experts or by the police or by state intelligence or by doctors Are we not also beholden to these same? Licenses these same ethics that these fields have Now I'm not necessarily saying we need to have a licensing or we need to have a particular code But if we have no standards if we have no way to review one another's work and to think about Whether we're following an ethical principles or whether we're helping or hurting lives Then we don't even have a starting place for these conversations on professionalism And if we're not willing to take on the burden of thinking about these things Then does the burden actually go away or are we just ignoring it? Finally, we reach some of the outspoken leaders of today's AI in today's era This is Joanna Bryson. She is a professor of computer scientist Or she's a professor of computer science who speaks on AI and natural intelligence at the University of Bath And she's been working on the field of AI ethics since the 90s She is a prolific writer and she's published all the time She has a paper over this past year on the epics of looking at word vectors and different gender disparity within them But she also has some older works for example her paper just another artifact ethics and the empirical experience of AI Articulates this problem of humans over identifying with artificial intelligence She essentially says that instead of treating it like a book or a reference we treat AI as a human actor as another intelligent human being with reason and common sense and so forth and She states that this is quite dangerous if we start treating AI as More expert than ourselves if we start treating it as the sole singular expert in the room Then what happens when it makes a mistake? So she's been quite outspoken on these issues On one of her longer posts she articulates some of her well thought out opinions on how we use data I'll read again from a longer quote as We in the computational computer social sciences learn more and more our models of human behavior get better and better As our models improve we need less and less data about any particular individual to predict what they are going to do So just practicing good data hygiene is not enough even if that was a skill that we could teach everyone My professional opinion is that there's no going back on this, but that isn't to say that society is doomed Think of it this way we all know that the police the military even most of our neighbors could get into our house if they wanted to but we don't expect them to do that and Generally speaking if anyone does get into our house We are able to prosecute them legally and claim any damages back from insurance. I Think our personal data should be like our houses First of all, we shouldn't be seen as selling our own data. Just leasing it for a particular purpose This is the model software companies are to use for their products We should just apply the same legal reasoning to we humans Then if we have any reason to suspect our data has been used in a way. We didn't approve. We should be able to prosecute That is the applications of our data should be subject to regulations that protect ordinary citizens from the intrusions of governments corporations and even friends What Joanna Bryson is asking of us here is to actually be better than the current laws Now we could get into some debates about the new EU privacy regulations and the fact that yes Indeed it has some ways that I can control my own personal data and I can request information about how my data is used but Those are clearly not global and they have yet to be determined in the courts how they'll be enforced What she's asking us to do is to treat people's data like their property Would you buy and sell another person's property without them knowing it and if not why do we do this with customer data? would you Collect pieces of another person's property without properly informing them in plain English so that they can understand what they're agreeing to and If not, why do we do it in our terms and conditions and a particular concern of mine regarding security? Would you take your friends laptop or computer or books or whatever it is that they have and would you leave it on a public table? outside for everybody to walk by and perhaps look at and If not, then why are you leaving your databases with protected information or your models with protected information on the public internet? Debating ethics at work is nothing new My great-grandmother was a pretty amazing woman. Here's her. Her name was Adele Matilda rich Her on the left is her growing up in New York City And she used to tell me really fun stories in the 20s and 30s of growing up in New York City and Her on the right is her with a very young version of me Now Madel as I used to call her was amazing. She has a lot of good memories that I have in my mind But the reason why I bring her up is the fact that she worked as a secretary on the Manhattan project The Manhattan project was the project in case you don't know the code words for the nuclear bomb in the United States And She worked as a secretary She used to tell me fun stories that she did something important for the war and that she had to burn her notebooks and so forth and I just thought it was a fun story until I got older She died when I was a child. So I was never able to have these types of conversations with her But I did talk with my mother who I know had several conversations And she said that Madel at first didn't know exactly what she was working on But slowly put the pieces together over time and then of course when the bombs were dropped. She was quite aware And I asked my mom did did she ever regret it? Did she ever stay up at night wondering if what she did was right or wrong? and my mom said that she thought that Madel felt like many of her generation that she was helping the good guys and that Any deaths that were created by the atomic bombs dropped were just small casualties in a larger war I Wonder if I could go back and ask her if we could have a longer conversation about this But it also makes me wonder if my own privilege now something that she worked so hard to do she worked to help make sure our family could survive through the war in the Great Depression and She made it so that my mom could be the first one to go to college and my mom going to college meant that I was able to get a computer and that I was able to go pursue pursue computer science So maybe he's wrong of me to question something like that Perhaps she was not in a position to make a decision between ethics and feeding her family and Perhaps it is rather ignorant of me to even ask that question But I also wonder if it is not a right for all of us to have rewarding work That's both challenging mentally financially rewarding and also ethically something that we can support so I challenge us as a community as data scientists web developers if you work on micro python core python Jython, whatever it is that you do internet of things. I challenge us to start having these Possibly more difficult conversations. I Challenge us to start thinking about who is responsible and how we can hold one another accountable Now you might not work on anything that touches ethics But perhaps you do or perhaps a co-worker does or a friend or a colleague or somebody you meet at this conference Perhaps a future you or a past you I Know in my career I've been definitely asked to do unethical things and I've been asked to lie to make charts look different to make data look different For the greater good right for extra funding for whatever it is that the goal of the company or the product is So I've had to have some of my own ethical decisions. I Think that hopefully what we've heard today and what we've shared today can start to be a ground for a communal conversation. I know that in a community like this one. We have values For example, I feel like as a python community. We value diversity. I Feel that we value free software and open source and I'm very proud of that. I Also feel welcome and supported today just the same as my first python conference in 2010 So we have these shared beliefs and they shared values already But perhaps we don't have a larger understanding of how they relate to ethics and computing as a whole or how they could inform a communal ethic or communal principles codes of conduct ideas that we share with one another and conversations that we have openly Now it may not be that we come to some communal agreement But just the idea of sharing our stories openly sharing stories like these from around the world openly that tell us a little bit about the history the ideas and these deep questions and dilemmas that we have Perhaps that is a way to start being a better force in the world We data scientists program as pythons us Computer and software engineers. We do have this cultural and ethical history. I Hope that it's shown. This is only just a few of what I was able to find in my research. I Want us to share these stories and I want to hear your stories and have you share your stories as well of these ethical dilemmas that we face and the decisions that we make around them and I Truly truly believe that in doing so we are more that when we have these conversations together We're actually contributing to a greater good Perhaps by having all of these conversations and working together. We can make sure that AI machine learning natural language processing and Python have a bright future in justice and That that's something that we can be really proud of And I know that I want to be a part of that and I hope that you do too Thank you so much for being here, and I hope to continue this conversation throughout the conference Everybody's really quiet because there's a lot of thinking going on in the room, but we have time for questions So who has questions or comments? It allows us to operate without banks. So what do you think about this? Yeah, so I definitely think I Shared some folks today throughout history and there was a few that touched a little bit on this But I feel like this is definitely something more of our generation our era The idea of using kind of some of this technology to subvert the norm right to actually actively work against corporate influence on our life or Government influence on our lives So I think that there's a lot of ways that technology can be used to kind of actively work against some of these ideas I completely agree, and I think that that's a really important conversation that Unfortunately didn't quite fit in in this talk But I think that's really important to share and think about and this is kind of this idea of us creating Technologies that actively support what we believe in and then as we spread them in the world that that Hopefully makes more things possible like I look at teams like the signal team and what they're working on and I think it's really great there's some there's some amazing work out there and Perhaps you work on those things as well And these are really interesting conversations to me and things that we should also be highlighting, right? Thank you Hi, thank you for the amazing talk. I would like to ask you a question about the Autoization especially if you see difference between What happened what will happen probably with this machine learning revolution in some sense and Something like the industrial revolution or what happened in China because I mean the advantage that they see all those other things that Up in the past is that in fact they lifted a lot of people from poverty even though it was not a Great process in some sense That was the main advantage with one show we say when you talk about you know Automation machine it has also human side, which was I mean helping people What do you think there is some differences between what will happen that has already happened and why this should raise some different question regarding ethic So sorry the question exactly is about how the computer revolution is different than revolutions before it or and sorry The question is how do you think? ethically this is different in some sense one should we What we should think about Is this just automatization on a larger scale? Yeah, or is something innately different Yeah, I wonder about that because yeah clearly the industrial revolution was and Other previous revolutions for example the printing press and so forth created their own ethics and their own issues What I wonder about with computers is like as we've seen with Moore's law and then also with the new post AI winter We're seeing like quite a lot of progress In a short amount of time. I don't know if that's the same amount of progress I obviously wasn't alive them and I'm no expert on previous revolutions. I'm not even expert on this revolution so I Don't exactly know but I wonder if the pace and perhaps the expanse is slightly more impactful now That maybe because of the internet and because of the advances that we've made in computing Perhaps we have like a more quick impact on people's lives. I don't know if this is true But sometimes I think that perhaps this might be the case But I would be curious to hear more of your thoughts on that topic as well Great talk really great. I was thinking about Thinking about the ethical side of what we do on daily basis really important But my concern is more for example the people who started Investigating the outcomes and their subparticles many many years ago They had no idea that this will lead to the to the Manhattan project So do you have any advice is how we can try to predict the future implications of our work and how they can Their ethical result 50 or 100 years from now This is something or if I had an answer for you I would be telling it to the world from the rooftops, and I don't know I think perhaps we we need to I Echo that concern I don't know what things that I work on today and things that people much brighter than me work on today I have no idea what large impact these will have on the world a decade from now even five or ten decades from now So but I do think we should be thinking about it, and I think that I I was heartened to when I was reading and doing research for this that some of these people were trying to project and think About what this could do in the future now a lot of the times what they were pretty far off But I think that it doesn't hurt to start the conversation now and to work together to perhaps see what this might mean in 10-50 years and for example how we can protect against things that we're fearful of and Also support ideas that we think would be really great things that we can do with technology Thank you for an awesome keynote I Think at least for my point of view it's pretty obvious that Automation of work trend that will continue and that will probably worsen any social disparities that we have now And do you have any ideas where to start a conversation about how technologists can help in this situation Instead of worsen the state that we are already in Yeah, so I think that as I was thinking about this and when I found the computer Professionals for social responsibility now. There are some groups that are working on these types of things There's like fairness accountability and transparency a machine learning group and conference There are some other ones that are trying to start these conversations about how we can consciously How we can be socially conscious actors when we do automation. I Think that this would be a great Thing to have a group around or a conference around or ideas around. I am no expert I'm just some a person like you who is concerned and I think that the more that we are able to share our ideas I think that honestly collectively we are much more smart than any of us individually And perhaps by having these types of debates openly we can figure out maybe Thoughtful ways that we can automate so that perhaps the impact is lessened I also agree automation is definitely not gonna go anywhere and nobody's going to stop automating because of a keynote Or because somebody has concerns so I think that yeah having these conversations and collectively coming up with some good solutions or some good ideas is Most likely the most powerful thing that we can do We have three more questions and if you promise to keep them short I'm going to take them, but I think probably since it's such an interesting Subject would you be willing to do an open space for that? Yeah, sure sure So basically if you know don't know open spaces yet We have a large room there You can just join there and make up your own euro python. So and there's a yeah, that's what it's for So there's a whiteboard downstairs. You can use it. So we're going to put an open space for this on I'm going to tweet all also about it because I think many are interested and there's like three more short questions. Yeah Yeah, cryptocurrencies has been just cited as one of the possible Good signs of organization. I see them as a Clearest example of what you said when you have technology advance without social advance because basically We have to burn oil because there was no other way than the proof of work to distribute bitcoins Do you think this is related to some more intrinsic? characteristic of computer scientists that is disbelief not just in current democratic institutions but in democratic processes in general which makes it difficult maybe to have Even just discussions because if they are pointless, we will not have them Yeah, so you're asking like the the anonymity that a computer allows me or that the internet allows me Does it break down these types of conversations? Yeah a more anarchic background compared to the idea that the democracy can help us have social advantage advances Yeah, I mean this is a massive debate and something that I thought about including but I just didn't have time to include like for Example these people that believe that we should have parts of the internet where you have to be yourself, right? Allowing us to have let's say like that use the internet as a system of political or social trust right and then you also then have governments using that to actively persecute activists and Using the same like okay. I can publicly identify you or I can easily de-anonymize you amongst big data so I can actively persecute you and This is this like thing the more that we create systems that we can use for perhaps creating these types of like public Conversations where I can represent myself and on a global stage and be an identifiable actor is also a problem and This is nothing new right? This is something that since way before the internet, but it means that perhaps Yeah, in some cases anonymization and these types of things are necessary to protect people, but I think it's some It's a really interesting debate And there was a few people that I wanted to include that are having this debate openly about e-democracy and so forth and I think that it's fascinating and it's something that Yeah, hopefully we one day can can trust let's say international Institutions to help support people if they come forward publicly and they identify themselves and they speak of atrocities within their country or so forth Snowden that they perhaps then are supported globally and have Protections globally and I just don't know if we're there yet. Unfortunately Okay, last question Okay, so my question was a bit based on what this is right now How exactly do you come out after you find something that's just Seriously unethical exactly like snow then he discovered that NSA was really not doing what I was supposed to do and you got to a point where Hey, you're just getting everyone's that and you're doing something that's incredibly How exactly do you come out? I mean you start to dispose information. That's not really for the public But if you keep on doing what you're doing, you're actually compromising more It's a very moral shaky ground, but be your recommendation for your view Yeah, so I think the the protections for whistleblowers within computing within internet and these types of things they That we have to really evolve the conversation That being a whistleblower for something like a massive multinational corporation or a massive multinational state intelligence agency Like these are things. Where do you then go? Like how who's supposed to protect you, right? And I think that this is particularly dangerous within our field like if I worked for a massive multinational corporation And I knew that we were doing something wrong What what am I supposed to do if I come forward? I almost likely be fired There will probably be a target of everything against my name make me out to be an idiot an unethical human and so forth and If we as a community have more of ways that we treat whistleblowers and more ways that we protect whistleblowers Maybe people would feel more comfortable, right? Because I also agree that what are you supposed to do? And in some of these stories, I'll be publishing a little bit more about this And I'll be putting some stories on my blog of some of the folks and what they did But for example, there is a man called david parnas and he was A computer scientist and worked in canada for the u.s. Department of Defense along with a few other multinational defense agencies and he wrote a big public Resignation letter and he sent it all around everywhere. He could think of this is the days of the mailing lists not particularly public internet And he publicly said this is unethical everything that's happening within this organization is Not something I believe in I refuse to work here and I don't know why my peers continue to do so And I think that we can look at some of these references in history to perhaps think about how we can make some of the same statements But that also we have to figure out how to protect one another when one another is willing to step forward and do that Okay, thanks for this again for this amazing keynote