Software engineering influences every things, living or otherwise, in this planet and beyond which makes ethics within the field all that much important. Most events in the past decade and more have software engineering as the driving force. Software engineering has touched every home to space exploration, autonomous vehicles to finance, medicine to entertainment and much much more. The vast influence of the field makes ethics all that much important. The field has had more than its fair share of scandals in the recent past.
Sexual harassment has been on the news for the past 12 months or so. Men of all walk of life have been implicated sexual harassment scandals, including politicians, role models, entertainers and athletes. Software engineering is no different. We lived through gamergate just a few years ago. We have seen women in the field being harassed out of the domain. Some have come out fearless and fighting for change like Brianna Wu, who is one of the victims of gamegate. She came out stronger after the incident and is now running for congress on the platform of privacy and online harassment.
Almost every big software company seems to been embroiled in some ethical scandal in the recent past. Uber has its sexual harassment scandal and paying hackers to cover up data breach and lawsuit relating to theft of trade secret. Facebook is embroiled in fake news and Russia scandal along with consumer privacy violation and influencing news feed by suppressing views they did not agree with. Apple had its poor treatment of factory workers in China under great scrutiny. Software dependent trading and lending industry led to depression all over the world in 2009. And the list goes on and on.
The future is bound to brings more ethical and moral challenges in the field. There is some major conversation in the industry in regards to autonomous vehicle. The scenario of unavoidable accident has been the highlight of the dialogues. Having this exchange before a catastrophe is better than conversation after and it shows that the industry is maturing. However, chasing sexy story of unavoidable accident dilemma has left more important conversations in the back seat. With self driving car, unemployment is bound to rise. There is very few conversation on role of software engineers when this happens within the next few decades. This predicament not limited to autonomous vehicles. Software engineering has slowly automated every industry, which has improved the the quality of life of many but has left many behind. Something has to give as more and more people gets left behind.
I would have included privacy as one of the major topic of ethical conversation just a few years ago. Today smartphone in every pocket is tracking the phone owner, there is unsecure internet of things in every nook and corner and data breach has been a common news. Expecting privacy in this environment is fools gold.