1.5.2a: The individual moral, social, ethical and cultural opportunities and risks of digital technology: Computers in the workforce; Automated decision making; Artificial intelligence; Environmental effects; Censorship and the Internet; Monitor behaviour; Analyse personal information; Piracy and offensive communications; Layout, colour paradigms and character sets.
| Keyword | Definition |
|---|---|
| Artificial intelligence | Can allow data to be processed in a way that learns from its mistakes. This can be biased by input data or could operate without human discriminatory behaviour |
| Automated decision making | Can cause complex moral questions to be simplified to an algorithm followed by a computer system which is unable to take into account the complexity of a real life scenario, but can save time and money. |
| Censorship | How computer systems can either give repressed people a voice (e.g. encrypted social media) or be used to limit people's access to information (e.g. blocking web sites) |
| Character sets | ASCII can only store letters and symbols used in the american alphabet. Unicode can represent any international characters such as accents or non latin scripts. |
| Colour paradigms | consideration that needs to be given to the use of certain colours which represent concepts like stop / go or good / bad. Different cultures may have different connotations attached to different colours and some individuals may be colour blind |
| Computers in the workforce | Can cause humans to lose jobs and be replaced by automated processes or can cause humans to move from low skill, low wage jobs to higher skilled higher wage jobs maintaining and designing automated systems. |
| Environmental effects | How computer systems can impact on the world in a positive way (e.g. recycling) or a negative way (e.g. pollution) |
| Layout | consideration that needs to be given to how a web page or application is displayed to take into account of some cultures reading from right to left rather than left to right. |
| Monitor behaviour | Individuals or organisations can use technology to track the location and habits of people with or without their consent. |
| Offensive communications | technology can be used to distribute terrorist material, hate speech or pornography |
| Personal information | can be analysed to provide better customer service or can be abused or sold for profit |
| Piracy | intellectual property can be shared easily using technology without the consent of the creator or owner. |
| The Internet | Can allow long range communication and collaboration which can boost productivity but can also provide access to illegal or immoral content |
