Lecture 2 - Codes
Code of Hammurabi
Code of Hammurabi
- Among the oldest known legal codes, the Code of Hammurabi is quite detailed. You can see a translation here. Discussion can be found here. Other notes.
- As you can see from the text, it is intensively concentrated on legal formulations. Like most legal systems, it does not derive from an enumerated set of principles, but rather is a series of prescriptions, transgressions, and penalties for transgressions.
Hippocratic Oath
- Probably the first significant professional ethical code, it is still in use today; there is a modern revision that has become popular in the United States.
- A translation and some discussion of the classical version can be found here.
- A modern version with much discussion can be found here.
- A collection of various medical codes is available here
Codes of Ethics for science in general
Ethics and Computer Science
Ethical codes specific to computer and information fields
Ethical codes specific to computer and information fields
Related
For instance…
Review of Chapter 2
- Privacy is perhaps the central concern of “Gift of Fire”, and it is one that will be revisited in all of the chapters of the text.
Review of Chapter 2
- Chapter 2 starts with a very appropriate mention of the East German Stasi, until recently the foremost exemplar of a total information awareness state. It then moves into the implications of digitalization for vastly increasing surveillance from merely human-centric systems like the Stasi to information-centric ones.
- The three key aspects of privacy for Baase and Henry are 1) freedom from intrusion (being left alone), 2) control of information about oneself, 3) freedom from surveillance. However, they do not expect complete privacy, and their hopes are modest indeed. To quote them, “For the most part, we view privacy as a good thing.”
Review of Chapter 2
- The text clearly outlines much of the business plan of Clearview AI: “Combining powerful new tools and applications can have astonishing results. It is possible to snap a photo of someone on the street, match the photo to one on a social network, and use a trove of publicly accessible information to guess…”
Review of Chapter 2
- The concept of “informed consent” is introduced in chapter two; this tenet (having gained much of its early attention in the medical area, particularly in the first point of the Nuremberg Code.) It is developed throughout the chapter.
Review of Chapter 2
- The issues of data mining and other secondary use of data is introduced in this chapter, and this is one of the most important subjects in ethics and computer science, encompassing not only privacy concerns, but concerns about the collection of data, such as Unit 731 data and, in the present day, Smart Cities data.
Review of Chapter 2
- While the widespread used of the term “surveillance capitalism” postdates the publication of the fifth edition, it is essentially discussed in section 2.2, “The Business and Social Sectors”.