Many of us got involved in computing because programming was fun. The advantages of computing seemed intuitive to us. We truly believed that computing yields tremendous societal benefits; for example, the life-saving potential of driverless cars is enormous! Recently, however, computer scientists realized that computing is not a game–it is real–and it brings with it not only societal benefits, but also significant societal costs, such as labor polarization, disinformation, and smart-phone addiction.

A common reaction to this crisis is to label it as an “ethics crisis” and talk about “corporate responsibility” and “machine ethics”. However, corporations are driven by profits, not ethics, and machines are built by people. We should not expect corporations or machines to act ethically; we should expect people to act ethically. In this talk, the speaker will discuss how technologists act ethically.

Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, USA. His research focuses on the interface of mathematical logic and computation – including database theory, hardware/software design and verification, multi-agent systems, and constraint satisfaction. He is the recipient of several awards, including the ACM SIGACT Gödel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Knuth Prize, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, and the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award. He is the author and co-author of over 750 papers, as well as two books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow as well as fellow of several societies, and a member of several academies, including the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science. He holds eight honorary doctorates. He is a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing.