system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What are some ethical issues/dilemmas in computer science?

I’m trying real hard to find a topic for a paper I have to write for an International Baccalaureate (IB) class. The topic has to be about an ethical issue or dilemma that is occurring in computer science.

Two topics I’ve found so far are ‘How much protection is enough for web users’ and ‘Are victimless crime better received than crime with human victims’ (for example is hacking someone as bad as physical assaulting them).

Thank you to anyone who helps!
gpt
Some obvious ones:

* Is mass surveillance for counterterrorism ethical?
* Are you obligated to falisfy data when not doing so causes an unethical outcome in machine learning? Consider a simple machine that decides whether or not to approve a loan - it works well, but looking at the weights of the net tells you it only really considers ethnicity. Removing this from the data results in noticeably worse predictions. Are you obligated to remove/falisfy the data? What if the net is so big and complicated that you can't tell exactly how it makes its decisions? What if, instead of removing the data, you just increase the size of the net massively and retrain it (starting with random weights again)?
* A machine learning based industrial machine fails in software and kills a worker. To what extent are the developers of the machine to blame for the death? Inverted: you use machine learning to build an industrial machine. It's much better than the standard, but, unlike the competition, it has an error rate, and this could result in deaths. Is it ethical to release/sell the machine?
* Related to the above: should machines be able to own copyright? Consider a machine that reads all the novels in the world and learns to write novels, and ends up successfully publishing, with the programmer only acting as its agent. Does the machine own copyright? Is the programmer stealing from the machine if they claim the book is their own?
*  Is mass-publishing/social media ethical? Consider the Arab Spring, organised via Facebook, and the recent phenomenon of 'fake news'.