I have a course this term named *Professional Practice in Computer
Science*. It talks about the ethic issues in computer science area.
During the course, our professor read some paragraph from a book named
[Computer
Ethics](http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Ethics-3rd-Deborah-Johnson/dp/0130836990),
written by Deborah Johnson. In the Preface, Johnson mentioned that the
first edition of the book was released when she gave birth to her
daughter about 25 years ago. And now (about 2001), her daughter had
became a teenager and was much comfortable with computers than
herself.
When our professor read this, he asked us “Where are WE?” Deborah
Johnson is a philosopher and is not as good as her daughter at
operating computer. Why all of the social issues about computer
science are discussed by those who are not professional at computer at
all? Lots of times those people, such as lawyers, philosophers or
sometimes computer engineers, make technically wrong ideas. However,
we don’t see many computer scientists sit at the table and talk about
their ideas.
Computer scientists always lock themselves in a dark basement and do
the technical stuff. They have push the computer science forward a
lot, indeed. But they seldom care about how do those techniques affact
to our society.
Our professor’s opinion is like we, as a computer scientist, should go
out from our basement, discuss our right ideas with other people, and
make some effects to the computer science in our society. While I have
an opposite idea.
What I think is the power of people is limited. People who talk about
society in public are most of those people because it their job. A
lawyer or a philosopher are likely to talk with public and persuade
others. But a computer scientist is different. As a scientist, we’d
like to make as mush as affect to our own area, science, instead of
social. Anyone can think about Donald Knuth coming out to talk about
computer ethics when he is suppose to do as much work as possible on
TAOCP?
Anyway, the society belongs to all of us, include computer scientists.
What we need is to so as much as we can in our profession, and leave
the social part to the people who are suppose to do it.