Social Implications of Computing

“The single biggest existential threat that’s out there, I think, is cyber.”

– Michael Mullen

The rise of the computing in the 21st Century, and its increasing growth of its presence in the developing world has changed the face of almost every aspect of society, most notably concerning culture. The most obvious effect has been the rise of the use of internet and its widespread consequences regarding how we communicate, socialize, learn, do business and many other things. I will be considering the implications of the computing ethics – which is innately linked to the internet – I shall look first at some of the other most important features such as commandments and cybercrimes.

To begin with, how do people decide what is morally right or wrong with the practices of cryptographers, hackers, web surfers and other internet audience. Humans know and acknowledge that snooping into another person’s computer files is inherently wrong, but computers are dumb machines which only understand binary digits and have no concept of this. Over the past 3 decades, computers have become an integral part of human life. Most people don’t go an entire day without using computers and its mightiest resource; Internet. Yet the Internet is mostly unregulated, which makes enforcing ethics really difficult. However, there ten commandments made by the Computer Ethics Institute which should be followed by everyone. They are as follows:

1. Thou shalt not use a computer to harm other people.
2. Thou shalt not interfere with other people’s computer work.
3. Thou shalt not snoop around in other people’s computer files.
4. Thou shalt not use a computer to steal.
5. Thou shalt not use a computer to bear false witness.
6. Thou shalt not copy or use proprietary software for which you have not paid.
7. Thou shalt not use other people’s computer resources without authorization or proper compensation.
8. Thou shalt not appropriate other people’s intellectual output.
9. Thou shalt think about the social consequences of the program you are writing or the system you are designing.
10. Thou shalt always use a computer in ways that ensure consideration and respect for your fellow humans.

Alongside, we hear a lot about cybercrime, but do we know what it is?

It’s a bit complicated than we think it is.

Like traditional crime, cybercrime can take many shapes and can occur nearly anytime or anyplace. Criminals committing cybercrime use a number of methods, depending on their skill-set and their goal. This should not be surprising: cybercrime is, after all, simply ‘crime’ with some sort of ‘computer’ or ‘cyber’ aspect.^[1]

Symantec defines it concisely as any crime that is committed using a computer or network, or hardware device. The computer or device may be the agent of the crime, the facilitator of the crime, or the target of the crime. The crime may take place on the computer alone or in addition to other locations. ^[1]

All in all, the impact of the internet on society is undeniable. Whether it is always for the best is a whole other matter.

[1]: http://us.norton.com/cybercrime-definition

Professors are not just teachers

People are generally ignorant about the phrase ‘university faculty‘ and most often than not make the assumption that faculty members are professors who only know how to teach and are unaware of their several other responsibilities.

To begin with, being a university faculty member entails a lot of responsibilities. Faculty members are not only responsible for maintaining the academic rigor of the college but are also counted upon for the following:

1. Research: This is one of the ways that faculty members contribute to the university and academic world. This way they enhance knowledge and understanding of different fields which may be in the form of scholarly inquiry, scientific investigation and/or artistic expression.
2. Shared Governance: Faculty members have the responsibility and right to be part of governance of the university. Voting members of several departments have the responsibility to attend all the university faculty meetings.
3. Outside Professional Activities: All faculty members are expected to participate in the affairs of, the important professional and educational associations/societies in their respective fields.

Furthermore, there are two UCSD professors who have really appealing research objectives and areas of expertise: Garrison W. Cottrell and Sanjoy Dasgupta. Professor Garrison is highly interested in neural networks, human cognition, cognitive science, computational philosophy and artificial intelligence. He believes in interdisciplinary research and has lead several research projects which have provided great results. He is focused on giving computerized simulations of the human cognition. His models of facial recognition have often been used to support theories of how human recognize facial emotions. He has also his equivalency of mathematic models and neural networks to computational philosophy to answer philosophical answers via computer simulations.

On the other hand, Professor Sanjoy has great deal of interest in high – dimensional statistics, clustering and machine learning. Algorithms are the keys to all the computational problems. They can make the toughest of the problems easy and logical to follow. Professor Dasgupta was the one to have developed the first provably correct and efficient algorithm for a variety of canonical statistical task. His fusion of algorithmic theory and mathematical statistics is indeed interesting.

Additionally, a few questions that I would like answered by the university faculty, especially the professors mentioned above are:

1. What concepts should I learn as a Computer Science undergraduate to be able to implement machine learning effectively?
2. How can an intelligent machine determine if it’s conscious or not?
3. What are the latest developments in neural networks in the past decade?