IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 4

president's message

Greg Adamson

omputers tell us what
to do, every day, all
the time. Is this a
problem? I may get
irritated when a traffic light tells me to stop while there
is no other traffic, or my microwave
alerts me it has finished, and reminds
me again and again. I just write these
off as poor design decisions.
As the stakes rise, so do the
problems. In 1999 after a ninemonth journey, programming errors
resulted in a $327 million probe
crashing into Mars due to misunderstanding between imperial and metric systems. Very expensive, and an
unfortunate setback to science, but
not life threatening.
As things get more complicated
the decisions get more convoluted.
Should a self-driving car cause a
crash that will kill its driver rather
than hit a group of pedestrians? This
is a variant of the "trolley" problem in
ethics. (A more practical issue may
be the ethical basis on which we
accept the deaths of more than a million people and the injury of tens of
millions of people each year related
to automotive technology accidents.)
This is moving into the territory
of the near future. Ken Jennings'
tongue-in-cheek response to losing

C

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2473975
Date of publication: 16 September 2015

4

Coping
with Machines
Jeopardy to the Watson machine
in 2011 was: "I for one welcome our
new computer overlords." There is
some suggestion that if computers
become "smarter" than people, why
not let them take over. While this
may become an ethical question in
the future, for the moment we face a
related challenge: we are not smart
enough to program machines to do
exactly what we want them to do.
As machines become more complicated, especially as they become
self-learning, we can no longer easily predict what will happen. Unanticipated errors have existed since
the first computers. Now we have
two further challenges.
First, we are going to need to
apply all our intelligence to keep
up with machines if we are to minimize unexpected negative consequences. The arrival of machine
self-learning makes this all the
more pressing.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

Second, while technologists can
understand this problem, for many
in the wider community technology
is a black box, treated with undeserved suspicion or trust. To avoid a
crisis in trust we have an obligation
to let the public know that we don't
have all the answers. This may be an
uncomfortable position in our role
as experts, but it is a necessary one.
Some of these points will be
the subject of a conference in Melbourne, Australia, July 13-15, 2016,
Thinking Machines in the Physical
World: http://21stcenturywiener.org.
I encourage you to attend.

Author Information
Greg Adamson, 2015-2016 IEEESSIT President, is with the School
of Eng ineer ing , Universit y of
Melbou r ne, Au st ra l ia. E ma i l:
g.adamson@ieee.org.

∕

september 2015
http://www.21stcenturywiener.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015
