1.5.2: Moral and Ethical Issues

Question 1

What are Ethics?

Answer 1

• Values of a community and how they impact different groups of people in society

Question 2

What are Morals?

Answer 2

• Personal code of conduct and how people choose to behave, including decisions made at the expense of others

Question 3

What are the advantages of Computers in the Workforce?

Answer 3

• Computers improve efficiency: Reduce delivery times and speed up manufacturing processes, thus improve customer satisfaction and reduce unit labour costs (lower prices for customers)
• Reduced strain on workers: Reduce the need to work in a repetitive and tedious environment
• Increase the demand for people in computer-related occupations: Search for employees able to confidently and productively use computers
• Rise in services being offered exclusively online: Reduced costs of renting physical spaces, and cutting labour costs as less workers are required to work as front-facing retail staff, and demand for delivery drivers to ship parcels, and web developers to ensure the website is consistently functioning

Question 4

What are the disadvantages of Computers in the Workforce?

Answer 4

• Job losses and structural unemployment: High consumer demand due to cheaper services will create employment in other sectors of the business. For the effects to be less severe, governments must invest in providing retraining programs so people are able to change occupation
• Hits middle-income manufacturing jobs the hardest as production lines replaced by robots: Shift towards low-income service jobs that aren-t necessarily associated with automation but are next at risk
• Significantly computerised workplaces are being highly depended on: If something goes wrong, there will be a major loss of output

Question 5

What are the advantages of Automated Decision Making?

Answer 5

• Improved productivity makes application processes more convenient for employers: Companies are able to hire worker faster using algorithms which can screen candidates for desired qualities before the interview stage
• Allows traders to look at past trends to model future changes in the stock market
• Fast decision-making is useful in plant automation systems and power distribution systems: Various inputs can be collected and analysed to respond instantly to changes

Question 6

What are the disadvantages of Automated Decision Making?

Answer 6

• Algorithms do not consider external circumstances and are unable to process information with the same consideration of contextual factors as humans
• Algorithms cannot be assumed to be free of bias due to having been developed by a team of software developers: Algorithms cannot be a black box, the decisions must be justified and some level of human input is essential to ensure fairness

Question 7

What are the advantages of AI?

Answer 7

• Is used in expert medical systems to draw connections between illnesses to form diagnoses
• Neural networks that replicate biological neural networks ‘learn’ from a set of data given and apply the knowledge to new data sets: Used in pattern detection and picking up on financial fraud
• Increased convenience for people: AI is used in voice recognition systems

Question 8

What are the disadvantages of AI?

Answer 8

• Privacy: Can AI voice recognition systems distinguish when it is right to listen and when it is an invasion of privacy to listen, as voice recognition is required to be constantly switched on to function as intended
• Accountability: Who is responsible when things go wrong? If AI ever reaches a stage at which it is considered sentient, what rights should it have?

Question 9

What are the advantages of Environmental Effects?

Answer 9

• Devices are produced cheaply and widely, making them affordable for a large proportion of the world population
• Push for renewable energy to power the increased amount of devices: The demand for energy has shed light on the need for a move to renewable energies to power devices
• Growth in environmentally-friendly technologies: Smart home systems are among one of many technologies emerging to ensure that the environment is not compromised with the rise in devices

Question 10

What are the disadvantages of Environmental Effects?

Answer 10

• Pressures in keeping up with trends: The rise in affordability means that many people are throwing away more devices as they can afford the buy new tech as trends change
• Some computer parts are built of mercury and radioactive isotopes: The throwing away of devices contaminates water supplies with toxic waste
• E-waste is often shipped to third world countries to be disposed of: Third world countries have lower environmental standards and the disposals are immoral and unacceptable
• More electricity is required to power the increase in devices: As more processes become computerised, more devices are required to be powered by fossil fuels emitting greenhouse gases

Question 11

What is Censorship?

Answer 11

• The suppression of the content that people are able to view, publish, and access

Question 12

What are the advantages of Censorship and the Internet?

Answer 12

• In the UK, ISP’s block content associated with terrorism and extremist political beliefs
• Some extent of censorship has become necessary for national security purposes and to filter offensive comments and propaganda
• Small scale censorship in the workplace: Used to maintain high productivity and prevent distractions

Question 13

What are the disadvantages of Censorship and the Internet?

Answer 13

• Censorship to block out other political opinions: There is much debate as to the extent with which government should be able to control what people have access to
• Countries may be able to push certain ideologies: The censorship is no longer acting to protect the country, and many consider such an idea to be unethical and unacceptable

Question 14

What are the advantages of Monitoring Behaviour?

Answer 14

• Monitoring of productivity: Used by employers to track what websites and apps workers are accessing and the time spent on each
• Crime detection: Surveillance systems and CCTV cameras are widely used for security purposed and to detect crime, useful for tracing and punishing criminal activity

Question 15

What is the disadvantage of Monitoring Behaviour?

Answer 15

• Tracking of locations of people under house contravenes basic human rights: Many argue that it is unethical to survey a person to such an extent, while others argue it is a necessary measure to put people off committing crime

Question 16

Why was the GDPR 2018 introduced?

Answer 16

• The DPA 1998 was no longer sufficient when it comes to protecting public welfare

Question 17

What are the disadvantages of Analysing Personal Information?

Answer 17

• Insights into personal information could reveal things against certain individuals: Data mining could uncover that a certain individual is at high risk of developing a disease, thus charging them a higher insurance premium, raising ethical questions about whether companies uncovering these trends have a responsibility to feed back to users
• Although companies are legally required to state what kinds of data they are collecting, this may not always be obvious to users

Question 18

What is the advantage of Piracy and Offensive Communications?

Answer 18

• The Malicious Communications Act 1998 makes it a criminal offence to send indecent or offensive messages to anyone online: Online harassment, such as cyber0bullying and stalking, is criminalised, and such behaviour can be traced by law enforcement and result in a criminal record

Question 19

What is the disadvantage of Piracy and Offensive Communications?

Answer 19

• The internet provides a seemingly anonymous front: It is becoming increasingly easier to commit acts of piracy over the internet as sources can be encountered by anyone, and it is up to the individual to make the decision as to whether or not it is ethically correct to merely interact with such sources of criminal acts

Question 20

What are the advantages of Layout, Colour Paradigms, and Character Sets?

Answer 20

• The Equality Act 2010 makes it illegal to discriminate against providing a service to a certain group of people: Web developers must consider who will be viewing their websites when they design them, websites must be laid out in a way that makes it easy for users to navigate between pages. Well laid-out websites will attract more customers
• Websites should provide alternative test for images and provide a screen magnifier option: People with visual impairments that visit websites must not be disadvantaged
• Neutral colour schemes are chosen for websites: To ensure that certain colours that are interpreted differently in different cultures do not mean that users will not want to visit that website
• Unicode is used for many websites: So that when websites are translated to different languages in order to make the website accessible over the world, there are enough bits available to represent different characters from different world languages