Engineers need a required course in ethics

Kush Saxena

qz.com
Originally posted November 8, 2019

Here is an except:

Typically, engineers are trained to be laser-focused on solving problems in the most effective and efficient way. And those solutions often have ripple effects in society, and create externalities that must be carefully considered.

Given the pace with which we can deploy technology at scale, the decisions of just a few people can have deep and far-reaching impact.

But in spite of the fact that they build potentially society-altering technologies—such as artificial intelligence—engineers often have no training or exposure to ethics. Many don’t even consider it part of their remit.

But it is. In a world where a few lines of code can impact whether a woman lands a job in tech, or how a criminal is sentenced in court, everyone who touches technology must be qualified to make ethical decisions, however insignificant they may seem at the time.

Engineers need to understand that their work may be used in ways that they never intended and consider the broader impact it can have on the world.

How can tech leaders not only create strong ethical frameworks, but also ensure their employees act with “decency” and abide by the ideals and values they’ve set out? And how can leaders in business, government, and education better equip the tech workforce to consider the broader ethical implications of what they build?

The info is here.

Nurses Wrestling With the Moral Uncertainties of MAiD

Barbara Pesut and Sally Thorne
Impact Ethics
Originally posted October 23, 2019

Have you tried to imagine what it is like to be the healthcare provider who provides medical assistance in dying (MAiD)? What would it feel like to go into a strange home, to greet a patient and family, to start an intravenous line, to deliver the medications that rapidly cause death, and then to bring some sort of closure before leaving? Although there has been a great deal of attention paid to the regulation of MAiD, and its accessibility to the Canadian population, we have heard relatively little about the moral experiences of the healthcare providers at the forefront of providing this service. That is surprising in light of the fact that all but 6 of the 6,749 MAiD deaths in Canada that occurred between December 10, 2015 and October 31, 2018 were administered by physicians or nurse practitioners.

In a recent study we interviewed 59 nurses from across Canada, who had diverse experiences with participating in, or choosing not to participate in, the MAiD process. Canada is the first country to allow nurse practitioners to act as both MAiD assessors and providers. Canadian registered nurses also play a key role in providing care to patients and families considering, planning for, or receiving MAiD. We learned a lot about the experiences of being involved in MAiD and about the type of wrestling with moral uncertainty that the involvement can entail. Nurses worked hard to make sense of this radical new end-of-life option. Making sense required some soul searching, some important conversations, and in some cases, encounters with the procedure itself.

Encounters with MAiD were inevitably deeply impactful. Some participants described an emotional overload that was unanticipated and didn’t necessarily fade over time. Others described a deep sense of compassion and purpose—a sense of beauty. Still others described an accumulating sense of distress, a rising tide that they didn’t necessarily know how to deal with. This was particularly true for those nurses who worked alone on multiple cases because they were the sole person willing to provide MAiD. Even those who had experienced MAiD only as observers described an emotional climate within the care environment that was far-reaching.

The info is here.

The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The role of motivation, attention and design in the spread of moralized content online

William Brady, Molly Crockett, and Jay Van Bavel
PsyArXiv
Originally posted March 11, 2019

Abstract

With over 3 billion users, online social networks represent an important venue for moral and political discourse and have been used to organize political revolutions, influence elections, and raise awareness of social issues. These examples rely on a common process in order to be effective: the ability to engage users and spread moralized content through online networks. Here, we review evidence that expressions of moral emotion play an important role in the spread of moralized content (a phenomenon we call ‘moral contagion’). Next, we propose a psychological model to explain moral contagion. The ‘MAD’ model of moral contagion argues that people have group identity-based motivations to share moral-emotional content; that such content is especially likely to capture our attention; and that the design of social media platforms amplifies our natural motivational and cognitive tendencies to spread such content. We review each component of the model (as well as interactions between components) and raise several novel, testable hypotheses that can spark progress on the scientific investigation of civic engagement and activism, political polarization, propaganda and disinformation, and other moralized behaviors in the digital age.

The research is here.

Racial bias in a medical algorithm favors white patients over sicker black patients

Carolyn Johnson
The Washington Post
Originally posted October 24, 2019

A widely used algorithm that predicts which patients will benefit from extra medical care dramatically underestimates the health needs of the sickest black patients, amplifying long-standing racial disparities in medicine, researchers have found.

The problem was caught in an algorithm sold by a leading health services company, called Optum, to guide care decision-making for millions of people. But the same issue almost certainly exists in other tools used by other private companies, nonprofit health systems and government agencies to manage the health care of about 200 million people in the United States each year, the scientists reported in the journal Science.

Correcting the bias would more than double the number of black patients flagged as at risk of complicated medical needs within the health system the researchers studied, and they are already working with Optum on a fix. When the company replicated the analysis on a national data set of 3.7 million patients, they found that black patients who were ranked by the algorithm as equally as in need of extra care as white patients were much sicker: They collectively suffered from 48,772 additional chronic diseases.

The info is here.

Is biohacking ethical? It’s complicated. A new Netflix series explains why.

Sigal Samuel
www.vox.com
Originally posted October 22, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Biohacking raises a lot of questions with huge ethical implications. Should biohacking yourself be a human right or should your control over your own body be curtailed — possibly even criminalized — if it’s risky to you or others? (Many biohacking pursuits exist in a legal gray zone but are not yet outright illegal, or not enforced as such. Some new gene therapies profiled in Unnatural Selection, like Jackson Kennedy’s, are approved by the Food and Drug Administration.) Will biohacking enhance life for all of us equally or will it widen the gap between haves and have-nots?

Perhaps we’d do best to strictly limit the use of new technologies like CRISPR. But then again, given that people are dying and these technologies might help, can we morally afford to not use them?

Ethical objections to biohacking

While some people who engage with biohacking view themselves as part of the scientific establishment and often voice ethical concerns about technologies like CRISPR, others have a strong anti-establishment streak.

Unnatural Selection assigns uneven weight to different camps — proponents of the new technologies get more airtime than their critics, perhaps because it’s more visually interesting to watch people inject themselves with new DNA than it is to watch finger-wagging bioethicists warn about risks.

The info is here.

Is this “one of the worst scientific scandals of all time”?

Hans Eysenck

Stephen Fleischfresser
cosmosmagazine.com
Originally posted 21 October 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Another study on the efficacy of psychotherapy in preventing cancer showed 100% of treated subjects did not die of cancer in the following 13 years, compared to 32% of an untreated control group.

Perhaps most alarming results were connected to Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek’s notion of ‘bibliotherapy’ which consisted of, as Eysenck put it, “a written pamphlet outlining the principles of behaviour therapy as applied to better, more autonomous living, and avoidance of stress.”

This was coupled with five hours of discussion, aimed both at reorienting a patient’s personality away from the cancer-prone and toward a healthier disposition. The results of this study, according to Pelosi, were that “128 of the 600 (21%) controls died of cancer over 13 years compared with 27 of 600 (4.5%) treated subjects.

"Such results are otherwise unheard of in the entire history of medical science.” There were similarly spectacular results concerning various forms of heart disease too.

These decidedly improbable findings led to a blizzard of critical scrutiny through the 90s: Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek’s work was attacked for its methodology, statistical treatment and ethics.

One researcher who attempted a sympathetic review of the work, in cooperation with the pair, found, says Pelosi, “unequivocal evidence of manipulation of data sheets,” from the Heidelberg cohort, as well as numerous patient questionnaires with identical responses.

An attempt at replicating some of their results concerning heart disease provided cold comfort, indicating that the personality type association with coronary illness was non-existent for all but one of the types.

A slightly modified replication of Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek’s research on personality and cancer faired no better, with the author, Manfred Amelang, writing “I know of no other area of research in which the change from an interview to a carefully constructed questionnaire measuring the same construct leads to a change from near-perfect prediction to near-zero prediction.”

The info is here.

Artificial Intelligence as a Socratic Assistant for Moral Enhancement

Lara, F. & Deckers, J.
Neuroethics (2019).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-019-09401-y

Abstract

The moral enhancement of human beings is a constant theme in the history of humanity. Today, faced with the threats of a new, globalised world, concern over this matter is more pressing. For this reason, the use of biotechnology to make human beings more moral has been considered. However, this approach is dangerous and very controversial. The purpose of this article is to argue that the use of another new technology, AI, would be preferable to achieve this goal. Whilst several proposals have been made on how to use AI for moral enhancement, we present an alternative that we argue to be superior to other proposals that have been developed.

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Here is a portion of the Conclusion

Given our incomplete current knowledge of the biological determinants of moral behaviour and of the use of biotechnology to safely influence such determinants, it is reckless to defend moral bioenhancement, even if it were voluntary. However, the age-old human desire to be morally better must be taken very seriously in a globalised world where local decisions can have far-reaching consequences and where moral corruption threatens the survival of us all. This situation forces us to seek the satisfaction of that desire by means of other technologies. AI could, in principle, be a good option. Since it does not intervene directly in our biology, it can, in principle, be less dangerous and controversial.

However, we argued that it also carries risks. For the exhaustive project, these include the capitulation of human decision-making to machines that we may not understand and the negation of what makes us ethical human beings. We argued also that even some auxiliary projects that do not promote the surrendering of human decision-making, for example systems that foster decision-making on the basis of moral agents’ own values, may jeopardise the development of our moral capacities if they focus too much on outcomes, thus providing insufficient opportunities for individuals to be critical of their values and of the processes by which outcomes are produced, which are essential factors for personal moral progress and for rapprochement between different individuals’ positions.

What School Shooters Have in Common

Jillian Peterson & James Densley
edweek.org
Originally posted October 8, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

However, school shooters are almost always a student at the school, and they typically have four things in common:

They suffered early-childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. They were angry or despondent over a recent event, resulting in feelings of suicidality. They studied other school shootings, notably Columbine, often online, and found inspiration. And they possessed the means to carry out an attack.

By understanding the traits that school shooters share, schools can do more than just upgrade security or have students rehearse for their near-deaths. They can instead plan to prevent the violence.

To mitigate childhood trauma, for example, school-based mental-health services such as counselors and social workers are needed. Schools can also adopt curriculum focused on teaching positive coping skills, resilience, and social-emotional learning, especially to young boys (According to our data, 98 percent of mass shooters are men.)

A crisis is a moment, an inflection point, when things will either become very bad or begin to get better. In 80 percent of cases, school shooters communicated to others that they were in crisis, whether through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence. For this reason, all adults in schools, from the principal to the custodian, need high-quality training in crisis intervention and suicide prevention and the time and space to connect with a student. At the same time, schools need formal systems in place for students and staff to (anonymously) report a student in crisis.

The info is here.

Memphis psychiatrist who used riding crop on patients now faces new charges

Brett Kelman

Nashville Tennessean
Originally published October 27, 2019

Here are two excerpts:

A Memphis-area psychiatrist whose license was suspended last year for using a riding crop on patients could now lose her license again due to an ongoing dispute with state health licensing officials.

Dr. Valerie Augustus, who runs Christian Psychiatric Services in the suburb of Germantown, was forced to close her clinic last June after a medical discipline trial proved to the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners that she had used a riding crop or a whip on at least 10 patients. The clinic was permitted to re-open six months later after Augustus agreed to professional probation, but she continued to fight the case in court.

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Augustus, 57, ran her clinic for 17 years without any discipline issues before her license was suspended last year. A board order states that, in addition to using the whip and riding crop on patients, Augustus kept the items “displayed in her office” and “compared her patients to mules.”

The government’s attorney, Paetria Morgan, argued at the medical discipline trial that Augustus hit her patients if they did not lose weight or exercise. In addition to the whip and riding crop, Morgan alleged Augustus hit patients with a “four-foot stick of bamboo.”

“Her defense is that she hit them in jest,” Morgan said. “When did hitting become funny? Hitting isn’t hilarious. Hitting isn’t helpful. Hitting isn’t healing.”

The info is here.