A Pledge of Ethics for I School Graduates
By Robyn Perry, I School MIMS ’15 | Permalink
When you hear about Volkswagen engineers cheating emissions tests, or face recognition software that can’t “see” Black people, you start to wonder who is in charge here. Or more to the point, who is to blame?
Well, I just graduated from UC Berkeley’s School of Information Master of Information Management and Systems program (MIMS for short). My colleagues and I are the kind of people that are going to be making decisions about this stuff in all sorts of industries.
This post is about one way we might hold ourselves accountable to an ethical standard that we agree to by means of a pledge.
As you might imagine, we spend a significant part of our coursework thinking about how people think about technology, how people use technology, and how what we design can do a better job of not destroying the world.