COMP 3020

PROFESSIONAL ETHICS IN COMPUTING

STUDENT NAME: ADHIKESAVAN ARAVINDAN

STUDENT ID: 20019794

SECTION-A

QUESTION 2:
Principle 2.1 STRIVE TO ACHIEVE HIGH QUALITY WORK
❖ A Computing Professional need to be focussed and determined to bring out the best quality
of work from both themselves as well as extracting the same from their colleagues.
❖ A Computing Professional should pay attention to protect and guard the dignity and self-
respect of employers, employees, colleagues, clients, users, and anyone else whoever
associated with the work either directly or indirectly.
❖ A Computing Professional also being expected to have transparent communication to the
ones who reserve rights to the project.
❖ A Computing Professional should be aware and avoid any serious negative consequences
which could affect any stakeholder either directly or indirectly because of their poorly
produced quality work. Also, required to resist the temptations to ignore this responsibility.

Principle 2.2 MAINTAIN HIGH STANDARDS OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE

❖ A Computing Professional’s high quality of work is the result of the individuals and the group
who thrives to acquire and maintain professional competence.
❖ Professional competence of a Computing Professional starts with gaining technical
knowledge and familiarising with the social environment in which they might be
deployed.Skills required by them includes good communication skills, deep reflective analysis
and being good at both perceiving and solving ethical challenges. Upgrading skills on a regular
basis is a key to success on maintaining high standards of work. This could be attained by
various ways such as studying independently, attending seminars/conferences of their
existing field etc and the skill development process should be encouraged and facilitated by
the professional organisations to sustain in the competitive world

Principle 2.3 KNOW AND RESPECT RULES PERTAINING TO PROFESSIONAL WORK

❖ A Computing Professional must respect and comply with all the rules and regulations of local,
regional, national, and international laws, as well as any policies and procedures of the

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 organizations to which the professional belongs unless there exist an unethical justification
to do so.
❖ Should challenge the unethical practices which lacks on the moral grounds. Before violating
the unethical rules, a computing professional should consider contesting/challenging the rule
through known existing channels. (for e.g., Consent ministry, Court of justice could be
approached)
❖ If a Computing Professional decides to violate a rule because it is unethical, or for any other
reason, should evaluate about the potential consequences caused by it and ready to be
responsible for the act committed.

Principle 2.4 ACCEPT AND PROVIDE APPROPRIATE PROFESSIONAL REVIEW

❖ A Computing Professional should seek for a professional review of the work at all stages for
the purpose of producing high quality of work.
❖ Whenever relevant, a Computing Professional is also being expected to seek and utilize peer
and stakeholder review. Moreover, it is also expected for a Computing professional to review
other’s work and provide them with a critical and constructive feedback regarding it.

Principle 2.5 EVALUATE COMPUTER SYSTEMS, THEIR IMPACTS AND RISKS

❖ A Computing Professional stays in a position to maintain trust, and therefore have a extra
responsibility to provide objective, credible evaluations and testimony to employers,
employees, clients, users, and the public while evaluating, recommending and presenting
system description and alternatives of the work at the same time.
❖ A Computing Professional should take extraordinary care to identify and mitigate potential
risks associated with the machine learning systems. Continuous re-assessment is required
while dealing with the systems where future risks can’t be reliably predicted.
❖ A system for which future risks cannot be reliably predicted requires frequent reassessment
of risk as the system evolves in use, or it should not be deployed. It is also required by a
Computing professional to fully disclose about any issues pertaining in the systems which
could result in major problems/risks to the appropriate parties.

Principle 2.6 PERFORM WORK ONLY IN AREAS OF COMPETENCE

❖ A Computing Professional is expected to thoroughly evaluate the work’s feasibility and
advisability of the potential work given to them and have a rough idea that whether it belongs
to their areas of expertise or not.
❖ Furtherly, if a Computing Professional founds out at any time before or during execution of
work that they are not expertise in the provided field of work, should be disclosed to the
employers and clients. It’s the decision of the employer or client to provide extra time to a
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 Computing professional to obtain necessary expertise in the field or switch to another one
who has expertise in the provided field. It is solely the ethical judgement of a Computing
Professional opting to work on the proposed assignment or not.

Principle 2.7 FOSTER PUBLIC AWARENESS AND UNDERSTANDING OF COMPUTING

❖ A Computing Professional is expected to share the technical knowledge, create awareness
and promote the understanding of computing to the public as much as possible and the said
communications should be made in a respectful and polite manner.
❖ The issues like impact of computer systems, their limitations, their vulnerabilities, and the
opportunities that they present in the real world should be shared to the public.
❖ In addition to that, it’s the responsibility of a Computing Professional to address the
inaccurate or misleading information regarding computing.

Principle 2.8 ACCESS COMPUTING ONLY WHEN AUTHORIZED OR FOR PUBLIC GOOD
❖ This Principle primarily expects that a Computing professional to not access another’s
computer system, software, or data without authorisation unless it is believed to be
consistent with public’s good.
❖ A Computing Professional should clearly understand that a publicly accessible systems isn’t
enough to imply its own authorisation.
❖ A Computing Professional may access the systems unauthorizedly only under exceptional
conditions and while doing so, it is expected to take extraordinary precautions to avoid harm.

Principle 2.9 DESIGN AND IMPLEMENT ROBUST AND SECURE SYSTEMS

❖ A Computing professional is expected to give utmost priority for the robust security while
designing the systems. Also, they must pay attention to ensure the systems work as intended
and perform appropriate actions to avoid accidental and intentional misuse, modification,
and denial of service of the secured resources.
❖ Further, a Computing Professional is expected to integrate mitigation techniques and policies,
such as monitoring, patching, and vulnerability reporting as new problems/threats may arise
after deployment. If undesirable events such as data breach took place in the systems, the
appropriate parties should be notified in a timely manner and to be provided with a proper
guidance and remediation.
❖ A Computing Professional is discouraged to make use of confusing security precautions which
are situationally inappropriate, or otherwise inhibit legitimate use. It is better to not
implement the systems when there exists a great possibility of misuse or harm.

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 SECTION-B

QUESTION 4:

a) Due diligence requires that reasonable care is taken in conducting professional work – what
does it mean to take reasonable care?
❖ You are competent to do the work required of you and your team.
❖ Appropriate steps are taken to avoid harm.
❖ Systems are robust, secure and respect privacy.
❖ Rules are followed.
❖ Special care is taken when modifying or retiring systems or systems are integrated in societal
infrastructure.

b) What are the 5 key characteristics of dependable systems as defined by Avizienis et al., and
what do they mean or require of a computing system?
❖ Availability :: Readiness for correct service. The likelihood that the system will be up and
running and able to deliver useful services to users.

❖ Reliability:: Continuity of correct service. The likelihood that the system will correctly deliver
services as expected by users.

❖ Safety:: The dependable system should have absence of catastrophic consequences on the
users and the environment. In simple words, judging of how likely the system will cause
damage to people or its environment.

❖ Integrity:: The dependable systems should have absence of improper system state
alterations.

❖ Maintainability:: The dependable systems should possess the ability to undergo repairs and
modifications. In simple words, it reflects the degree to which the system can
withstand/adapt to new modifications.

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c) 7 key ethical challenges created by robotics and autonomous systems have been identified by
the UK-RAS Network. What are they and what ethical issue is each challenge is concerned with?
1. Bias
Robotics and Autonomous Systems might have bias in their decision-making, as a result of
their (ML)machine learning. For example, the recent case of Autonomous vehicles have been
trained on an ethnically biased set of images(perhaps the researchers themselves) they do
have increased likelihood to recognise certain ethnic groups as human (due to clothing, skin
colour etc.,), and placed these groups at greater risk

2. Opacity
When decisions are not transparent enough and open to scrutiny, there is a possibility that
they are unfair and unjust and also not open to corrections. the introduction of the General
Data Protection Regulations (GDPR)8 brought right to explanation (Rte) due to the problem
of opacity. Right to explanation considered harmful.
GDPR and Article 22 (Automated individual decision-making, including profiling) Only applies
to personal data and decisions “based solely on automated processing” And only to solely
automated processing that “produces legal effects” or “similarly significantly effects”

3. Privacy
The Robotics and autonomous systems might access or contain data which could
against/violate an individual’s right to privacy and pass them to the third parties. For example,
an AV is likely to know where the owner or occupant travelled and may pass the physical
location against their approval to a third party.

4. Safety
This is a vast area, as we have witnessed so many deaths in recent due to autonomous
vehicles. The original motivation for the development of Autonomous vehicles was to
improve road safety, reduce accidents caused etc.,
It raises a great number of ethical issues around fail-safety, and the decisions involved in that
process.

5. Deception
When we look at humanoid robots, or robots made to look like pets, there is a great degree
of risk associated especially vulnerable users(can be manipulated easily). The studies say that
it is easy to design a robot to behave as if it has feelings and then create emotional
attachment or dependency in end users.
The 4th EPSRC Principle of Robotics states “Robots are manufactured artefacts. They should
not be designed in a deceptive way to exploit vulnerable users; instead their machine nature
should be transparent”.

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6. Employment
If we introduce of Robotic and Autonomous Systems in the real world in large scale certain
traditional jobs might be displaced, e.g., taxi drivers , data entry operators, bank clerks etc.
and this could cause a chaos in the society and refraining this back will be the topmost
priority.

7. Oversight
The ability to oversee, or govern Robotics and Autonomous Systems is an serious ethical issue
to look after. As operators should understand and manage the behaviour of systems for
which they are responsible.
This is linked Opacity mentioned above, and the ability to monitor and assess RAS becomes
tough in an open(real) environment.

THE END

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