Module 1: Introduction to Social and Ethical Computing

1. Module 1: Introduction to Social and Ethical Computing • Historical Development of Computing • Development of the Internet • Development of the World Wide Web • The Emergence of Social and Ethical Problems in Computing • The Case for Computer Ethics Education

2. After 1900 AD • The inventions before 1900AD were all crucial building blocks of the computing industry. • The Century began with a major milestone in the computing history, by the invention of the vacuum tube by John Ambrose Fleming. • This was a major development in computing as the vacuum tube played a major role in computing for the next half century. All digital computer in the first half century ran on vacuum / electronic tubes. • The next twenty years saw development of computing with a variety of inventions including the invention of the triode by Lee de Forest in 1906. • However, another major milestone invention, was to be born during this period. Although it was not to come into full use for some time, but 1926 saw the invention of the first semiconductor transistor that will come to dominate the computing industry in late years.

3. 1937 saw a milestone invention in the history of computing. The invention of the Turing Machine by Alan Turing in 1937 was as revolutionary as it was exciting. • Two years after Turing, in 1939, the world was to see its celebrated first digital computer developed by John Vincent Atanasoff, a lecturer at Iowa State College (now University).

4. Atanasoff’s computer was the first special –purpose electronic digital computer. • Around the same time Atanasoff and Berry were working on their model in 1939, Howard Aiken, a graduate of Harvard University, was developing the first large scale automatic digital computer. Aiken’s computer came to be known as the Harvard Mark I (also known as IBM automatic sequencer calculator- ASCC)

5. The next ten years saw the development of the actual working models of the digital computer as we know it today. • In 1943, Alan Turing, working as a cryptographer, constructed the COLOSSUS, considered by many as the world’s earliest working programmable electronic digital computer. The COLOSSUS, designed to break the German ENIGMA code, used about 1800 vacuum tubes and it was to execute a variety of routines. • Around the time the COLOSSUS was being developed by Alan Turing, a team of John William Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., working at the University of Pennsylvania, was developing another vacuum tube-based general purpose electronic digital computer. • Their model named electronic numerical integrator and computer, (ENIAC) was 10 feet high, weighed 30 tons, occupied 1000 square feet, and used about 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 6000 switches, and 18,000 vacuum tube. • After ENIAC went in use, the team encountered a number of problems the main being that it did not have an internal memory because it was hard-wired and it was consistently programmed by switches and diodes. This problem had to be worked on for the next model. • From 1944 through 1952, the team developed a new computer called the electronic discrete variable automatic computer – EDVAC.

6. This is believed to be the truly first general purpose digital computer. • EDVAC was a stored-program computer with internal read-write memory to store program instructions. • The stored program concept gave the device the capability for the program under execution to branch to alternative instruction sequences elsewhere in the stored program. • When it was completed in 1956, EDVAC was still a carousal machine with 4,000 vacuum tubes and 10,000 crystal diodes. • Although most of these activities were taking place in USA, there were other efforts in other countries. For example, around the time EDVAC was being developed, there was an experiment at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom also based on the stored program concept. • Still in England, at Cambridge University, the electronic delay storage automatic calculator- EDSAC was produced in 1949. • Across the Atlantic in 1948, the universal automatic computer – UNIVAC I, became the first commercially available computer.

7. From that point, the general purpose computer took on a momentum of its own. • These companies and a number of others, built what came to be known as the mainframe, huge computers that consisted of a 4 to 5 feet by 8 feet tape drives, a huge control processing unit, a huge printer, several huge fixed disks, a large card reader and a paper punch. • These components usually filled a large room or two. Because these computers were big, expensive, and difficult to use – computers users could only use the computers through a computer operator. • The computer operator fed jobs to the computer via a card or tape reader. • Because of the fact that these computers were big, expensive and difficult to use, only large companies and institutions were able to use them.

8. Around mid to late sixties, a movement to make computers less expensive and more affordable started gathering momentum. • This movement led to a number of developments. First it led to the manufacture of a less expensive but smaller computer – the medium range computer commonly referred to as minicomputer. • Secondly, it started a mode of computing that later led to networking. This was the timesharing, where, one computer could be used by a number of users who would remotely connect on to the mainframe. • Third and most important, it led to a milestone in the history of computing. This milestone occurred between 1971 and 1976. This was the development of the first microprocessor. • A microprocessor is an integrated circuit with many transistors on a single board. Before the birth of the microprocessor, computer technology had developed to a point that vacuum tubes and diodes were no longer used.

9. The Development of the Microprocessor • The way forward was found by Ted Hoff. Hoff designed the world’s first microprocessor, the 4004. The fours in 4004, indicated that the device had a 4-bit data path. • The 4004 microprocessor was a four-chip system consisting of 256-byte ROM, a 32-bit RAM, 4-bit data path, and 10-bit shift register. It used 2,300 transistors to execute 60,000 operations per second, a top speed at the time [3]. • The development of the first microprocessor caught the world off guard. Even Biscom, the company that had commissioned Hoff, did not understand the potential of the 4004. So they requested him to design the twelve-chip set they hard originally wanted him to design [3].

10. In 1972, Intel, designed and introduced the 8008, an 8-bit microprocessor based on the 4004. • The 8008 was historic in its own right in that it was the first microprocessor to use a compiler, a system program that interprets user inputs into machine code and machine code to system outputs understandable by the user. The 8008 supported the compiler called PL/M. Both the 4004 and the 8008 were specific application microprocessors. • The truly general purpose microprocessor come out in 1974. It was the 8080, an 8-bit device with 4,500 transistors and packing an astonishing 200,000 operations per second. • From 1974, the development of microprocessors exploded as companies like Motorala developed the 6800 in 1974, MOS Technology developed the 6502 in 1975, and Zilog developed the Z80 in 1976. Since then, many new companies have sprung up and the speed, density of transistors, and functionality of microprocessors has been on the rise.

11. Historical Development of Computer Software and Personal Computer (PC) • Up until mid 1970s, the development of computing science was led by hardware. Computers were designed and software was designed to fit the hardware. • The development of software to run the computers was in the hands of the companies that designed the hardware. • The break from this routine came from two fronts: 1976 when the Apple I and Apple II microcomputer were unveiled, and 1981 when IBM joined the PC wars. • These two developments started a new industry, the personal computing industry. • Perhaps the PC industry may not have been the way it is today, were it not the development of the personal computer operating system (OS). • The history of the development of the PC operating system, hence the birth of the PC industry, involved three players: IBM, Gary Kildall, the fellow who developed CP/M, the PC operating system many believe to be the first PC operating system, and Bill Gates, the develop of the Disk Operating System (DOS). • The story, part legend, behind these players is the story of the beginning of the PC. The legend has it that when IBM developed the personal computer based on Intel’s 8088 microprocessor, in 1981, IBM needed an operating system. It is alleged that IBM approached Both Kidall and Gates. However, Kidall was out flying and failed to attend to IBM’s request before Gates did. • Gates developed the first DOS and a version of the BASIC programming language for IBM and the rest is history

12. The Development of the Internet • The Internet, a global network of computers, owes its development on the invention of four technologies: telegraph, telephone, radio, and computers. • History has it that the Internet originated from the early work of J.C.R. Licklider of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on "Galactic Networks". • Licklider conceptualized a global interconnected set of computers with communication channels between them through which programs and data could be accessed quickly by any computer from any computer . • The networking concept envisioned by Licklider would support communication between network nodes using a concept of packets instead of circuits, thus enabling computers to talk to each other. • He left MIT to head the computer research program at the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1962. • A year before, in 1961 at MIT, researcher Leonard Kleinrock had published what is believed to be the first published work on packet switching theory . • This work created the momentum for the packet switching network concept.

13. However, it was not the only work on the concept, there were two additional independent projects on this same topic, that of Donald Davies and Roger Scantleberg at the British National Laboratory (BNL) which later was credited with coining the term "packet", and that of Paul Baran at RAND. • In 1965, Lawrence Roberts at MIT, who had been collaborating with Licklider, and Thomas M. Roberts connected and tested the TX-2 computer from Boston on the east coast of USA to the Q-32 computer in Los Angels on the west coast of the USA, with a low speed dial-up telephone line. • This test experiment created the first working Wide Area Network (WAN). This experiment opened up doors for all computer network communications as known today. • In 1966 Roberts left MIT for DARPA to develop the computer network concept publishing the first plan for ARPNET in 1967. • In 1968, a go ahead was given by DARPA for the development of the packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP). • As the team, lead by Frank Heart and included Bob Kahn, developed the IMP, a team consisting of Roberts and Howard Frank designed the network topology and economics, and the network measurement system were done by Kleinrock and his team .

14. The work of these teams led to the testing of the first IMP at UCLA in 1969 connected to a second node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). • After these tests, more nodes were added to ARPNET and by end of 1969 four nodes formed ARPNET [5]. From this point on the Internet started to grow. • However, more work was needed to incorporate the host-to-host protocol into ARPNET. The first host-to-host protocol called Network Control Protocol (NCP) was developed by the Network Working Group (NWG) in 1970. But NCP did not have “the ability to address networks further downstream than a destination IMP on the ARPNET” . • Kahn then developed what later became the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). • As the number of nodes increased, more universities joined the exclusive club, and APRANET became not only a research facilitator, but it also became a free federally funded postal system of electronic mail.

15. In 1984, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) joined ARPANET in starting its own network code named NSFNET. NSFNET set a new pace in nodes, bandwidth, speed and upgrades. • This NSF funded network brought the Internet in the reach of many universities throughout the USA and internationally that would not otherwise afford the costs, and many government agencies joined in. At this point other countries and regions were establishing their own networks • With so much success and fanfare, ARPANET ceased to exist in 1989. • As the number of nodes on the Internet climbed into hundreds of thousands worldwide, the role of sponsoring agencies like ARPA and NSF became more and more marginalized. Eventually in 1994 NSF also ceased its support of the Internet. The Internet by now needed no helping hand since it had assumed a momentum of its own.

16. The Development of the World Wide Web • The World Wide Web, as we know it today, had its humble beginning from concepts contained in Tim Berners-Lee’s 1989 proposal to physicists calling for comments. • Berners-Lee, a physicist researcher at the European High-Energy Particle Physics lab- the ConseilEuropeenne pour la Recherché Nucleaire (CERN), Switzerland, wrote the proposal called HyperText and CERN, to enable collaboration between physicists and other researchers in the high energy physics research community. • Three new technologies were incorporated. They were: HyperText Markup Language (HTML) based on the hypertext concepts- to be used to write web documents, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) a protocol to be used to transmit web pages between hosts, and a web browser client software program to receive and interpret data and display results. • His proposal also included a very important concept for the user interface. • This browser supported interface was based on the concept that it would be consistent across all types of computer platforms to enable users to access information from any computer. The line-mode interface was developed and named at CERN in late 1989 and it came to be known as the world wide web or www.

17. By 1991, the concept developed only two years back was put into practice on a limited network at CERN. From the central computer at CERN with few web pages, the number of servers started to grow from the only one at CERN in 1991, to 50 world wide by 1992, to 720,000 by 1999, and to over 24 million by 2001 [6]. • In the US, in 1993, Marc Andreesen, an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne, and his team, while working on a National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), developed another graphic user interface browser they named Mosaic. • The graphic user interface (GUI) popularized the user and fueled the growth of the world wide web to bring it to the point where it is today.

18. The Emergence of the Social and Ethical Problems in Computing • The Emergence of Computer Crimes • The known history of computer crimes is not as old as computing is. • One can perhaps say that the history of computer crimes started with the invention of the computer virus. • The term virus is derived from a Latin word virus which means poison. For generations, even before the birth of modern medicine, the term had remained mostly in medical circles, meaning a foreign agent injecting itself in a living body, feeding on it to grow and multiply. • As it reproduces itself in the new environment, it spreads throughout the victim's body slowly disabling the body’s natural resistance to foreign objects, weakening the body’s ability to perform needed life functions and eventually causing serious, sometimes fatal effects to the body. • A computer virus, defined as a self-propagating computer program designed to alter or destroy a computer system resource, follows almost the same pattern but instead of using the living body, it uses software to attach itself, grow, reproduce and spread in the new environment. • As it spreads in the new environment, it attacks major system resources that include the surrogate software itself, data, and sometimes hardware weakening the capacity of these resources to perform the needed functions and eventually bringing the system down.

19. The word virus was first assigned a non-biological meaning in the 1972 science fiction stories about the G.O.D. machine, that were compiled in a book When Harly was One by David Gerrod ( Ballantine Books, First Edition, New York, NY, 1972). The term was first used to describe a piece of unwanted computer code. • Later association of the term with a real world computer program was done by Fred Cohen, then a graduate student at the University of Southern California. • Cohen first presented his ideas to a graduate seminar class in information security in 1983. His seminar advisor, Len Adleman, was the first to assign the term "virus" to Cohen's concept. • As part of these experiments, Cohen wrote five programs, actually viruses, to run on a VAX 11/750 running Unix, not to alter or destroy any computer resources but for class demonstration. During the demonstration, each virus obtained full control of the system within an hour [8]. • From that simple beginning, computer viruses, and hence computer crimes have been on the rise.

20. The Case for Computer Ethics Education • What is Computer Ethics • According to James H. Moore, who is believed to have first coined the phrase "computer ethics", computer ethics is the analysis of the nature and social impact of computer technology and the corresponding formulation and justification of policies for the ethical use of such technology . • Moore's definition focuses on the human actions that are routed in computer technology or influenced by computer technology. In other words, it is a study, an analysis of the values of human actions influenced by computer technology. Computer influence on human actions is widespread throughout the decision making process preceding the action. • We are looking for a way to deal with these problems, probably through education. So the definition of computer ethics, as outlines by Moore, gives us a starting point on this long journey.

21. Why You Should Study Computer Ethics • Moore’s contention is that the central task of computer ethics, in decision making processes that involve computer technology, should be to “determine what should be done” whenever there is a policy vacuum. Moore first observed that there are times when policy vacuums are created in the decision making processes, especially those that involve processes in which computer technology is ‘essentially involved’. • It is difficult to fully explain the cause of these vacuums, but one can say that they are mainly caused by the ‘confusion’ between the known policies and what is presented. • Moore tries to explain these muddles by a software example. Software offers a multiplicities of choices to the decision maker by computer technology, which can result in vacuums. • Several other factors contribute to the creation of these muddles. It is likely that computer users, especially computer professionals, may be unprepared to deal effectively with the ethical issues that arise in their places of work and everywhere else computers and computer related technology is used. • So naturally one would come to a conclusion that since we cannot stop computer technology which causes these muddles, we need a plan of action that will work with the changing computing technology and at the same time deal with the ethical issues that do arise. We need computer ethics education.

22. There are two schools of thought. One school, believes in the study of computer ethics as remedial moral education. • The other schools believes in computer ethics education not as a moral education but as a field worthy of study in its own right. • But for it to exist as a separate independent field of study, there must be a unique domain for computer ethics distinct from the domain for moral education, distinct even from the domains of other kinds of professional and applied ethics . In his paper “Is Computer Ethics Unique?”, Walter Maner explains the existence of the two schools with two views that: • (i) certain ethical issues are so transformed by the use of computers that they deserve to be studied on their own, in their radically altered form, • (ii) the involvement of computers in human conduct can create entirely new ethical issues, unique to computing, that do not surface in other areas.

23. According to Maner there are six levels of justifications for the two views, the first two for the first school and the last four for the second school : • We should study computer ethics because doing so will make us behave like responsible professionals. • We should study computer ethics because doing so will teach us how to avoid computer abuse and catastrophes. • We should study computer ethics because the advance of computing technology will continue to create temporary policy vacuums. • We should study computer ethics because the use of computing permanently transforms certain ethical issues to the degree that their alterations require independent study. • We should study computer ethics because the use of computing technology creates, and will continue to create, novel ethical issues that require special study. • We should study computer ethics because the set of novel and transformed issues is large enough and coherent enough to define a new field. • Whatever school one falls in, there is enough justification to study computer ethics.