CS 5/692, Winter 2020

March 9 / Week 10

The Dual-Use Problem; Societal Implications

“…it is not social progress to make black people equally visible to software that will inevitably be further weaponized against us.

— Zoé Samudzi

Traditionally, “dual-use” has referred to technologies that have both military as well as civilian applications. For today’s discussion, let’s build on that definition a bit, and consider applications of technology beyond what the original creator may have intended.

Readings

Note that these readings are on the shorter side.

• AGoF, Chapter 7
• WMD, Chapters 4 and 10
• ben-Aron, D. (1985). Weizenbaum examines computers and society. The Tech 105(16), 4/9/85
• Winograd, T. (1989). Strategic Computing Research and the Universities. In J. P. Jacky & D. Schuler (Eds.), Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing, DIAC- (Vol. 1, pp. 18–32).
• West, S., Whittaker, M., & Crawford, K. (2019) Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race, and Power in AI AI Now Institute tech report, 4/2019
• Bond, R. M., Fariss, C. J., Jones, J. J., Kramer, A. D. I., Marlow, C., Settle, J. E., & Fowler, J. H. (2012). A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. Nature, 489(7415), 295–298.

As you read that last one one, keep in mind Mark Zuckerberg’s recently-reported comments about Elizabeth Warren:

“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies…if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government… But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”

— Mark Zuckerberg (emphasis added)

Optional

• Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136.
• Douglas, T. (2014). The dual-use problem, scientific isolationism and the division of moral labour. Monash Bioethics Review, 32(1), 86–105.