Essay: Ethics

Date: 12/4/2018
Name: Shahzaib Shahid

Ethics

Ethics determine the standards of what is right and wrong and having high ethical standards in a
society promotes fairness, equality, virtues and a need to produce the best possible solution to a
problem.
Societies that are renowned across the world have one thing in common, they are known for their
extremely high ethical and professional standards. Societies like the IEEE are known across the
world simply because they give the latest and greatest solutions to the problems that are
associated with technology and the field of electrical, software and computer engineering.
Ethical obligations are important in nearly every field but in some fields they are more important
than the others. Fields like engineering that deals with machines, buildings and devices that
people use on a daily basis are subjected to higher ethical standards because they, if they do not
make their products carefully, can cause injuries to people and can also pose a threat to people’s
lives.
Companies, industries and organizations that try to cheat the ethical standards to benefit
themselves damage their reputation hugely and can also be subjected to huge fines. One such
example is Volkswagen, the company that produces automobiles, who admitted that they had
fitted about 11 million of their cars with ‘sophisticated software’ to reduce emissions during
tests, but in reality those 11 million cars produced a massive amount of Nitrogen dioxide
Due to this Volkswagen was caught cheating by environmental protection agency and was 18
billion dollars.
Volkswagen broke their ethical standards and was not honest about their cheating. They were
caught and then admitted to have used these devices that helped them reduce their car emissions.
They broke the fundamental ethics of Honesty, Responsibility, and integrity. That is also part of
the IEEE code of ethics to be responsible, honest, and the most important of them all, to not
injure or hurt anyone. By using those machine Volkswagen caused millions of lives in danger
along with causing huge damage to the environment.
In some cases however, the rules of ethics become a bit confusing as to what might be
considered ethical or unethical. One such example of this is the Amazons voice assistant Alexa.
The device was involved in a crime scene where a person was murdered. The police wanted
Amazon to give the data of that device to the department because they thought that it may help
solve the murder mystery. Three friends were watching a football game together and one of the
friends went to go to sleep at around 1 am. When the guy who went to sleep woke up in the
Morning he saw one of his friends murdered. The reason why Alexa was so important in this
crime scene was because the device always records the surrounding voices to make sure that it
works properly and not do any task when not being told to do a task. Now the first ethical
corundum that comes up in this case is, whether the voice of a person or a user can be recorded
and stored by amazon in the first place, because in the US an organization needs a warrant to
record or wiretap somebody’s voice without their consent. But the thing is that the device itself
needs to record voice to make sure it functions properly and the user who buys this device should
know that his or her voice is being recorded for the device to work.
Another ethical problem that occurred was that Amazon refused to hand over the data of the
device to the investigation authorities because they thought it was a breach of someone’s
information that the user has authorized (debatable) Amazon to take care of. Ethically, this
stance of Amazon is right, but police and the investigation team say that they would be able to
solve the case and provide justice to the victim and his family by catching the culprit who
murdered him in the first place. Police thinks that it is ethically wrong of Amazon to not share
the data of the user with the investigation team. So in this specific case both parties are ethically
right in their own ways. So in this situation it comes down to which party is more ethically right.
No such precedence has been set so this just depends upon the person making the decision to see
which option appeals more to him and which party is more ethically right.

Again at the end we should always remember to be honest, ethical, and not harm anybody’s
property, life or even their privacy for their own good. Whenever engineers make their products
they should make sure they abide by the rules mentioned and make their products for all kinds of
people regardless of their disability, color and national origin. Those are the products that, if they
perform properly, are the most successful.