As a general principle I think that intellectual property requires less protections than physical properties. As we discussed in class, stealing a physical object is very different from stealing an abstract concept or idea. In the former case, the theft leaves the victim without the object, while in the latter case, the victim retains their knowledge of the idea. I do believe, however, that intellectual property should be protected under the law. Protections for intellectual property, if implemented in a careful way, encourage the flourishing of innovation and benefit society at large.

            Protections for intellectual property can come in many forms. Let’s begin by taking a look at patents, one of the primary ways to protect IP. Patents are exclusive rights granted by a government to an inventor to manufacture, use or sell that invention for a period of time. The intention behind patents, is to provide inventors and incentive to research potentially risky or expensive ideas by guaranteeing that they can profit off of their inventions without competition. For example, if a company invests heavily in the development of a new innovative product, its competitors will not be able to copy that product while the patent for the product is in effect. In theory, this means that your inventions become your “property” in the sense that others cannot use it without your permission (usually granted in exchange for a hefty sum of cash).

            Do patents really encourage innovation though? The existence of patent trolls provides a counterpoint to the argument that patents encourage innovation. Patent trolls are organizations that hold patents and then sue for patent infringement. They do not have any products, do not employ many people, nor do they focus on inventing new things. Patent trolls acquire patents and then start lawsuits against any person or company that is infringing on those patents. It seems counter-intuitive, that a company without products or employees should be able to make hundreds of millions off of suing Apple for example. When invention can carry huge legal risks, maybe the patent system is doing more to hurt innovation than it is to help.

            The patent system also tends to favor large companies over smaller ones. Large companies have the funds and legal expertise to make use of the patent database and fight the requisite legal battles that using those patents might entail. Smaller companies tend to avoid even reading patents that are related to their products to avoid the possibility of infringement. This defeats the purpose of patents as a tool for disclosure of technological information. The patent database should be a resource for companies to drive innovation, not a dangerous trap filled with legal fines. In other words, big players can benefit while smaller businesses are left behind.

            The patent system should enable the average person to benefit from innovating and inventing, not just mega corporations with huge legal teams. The patent system has contributed greatly to America’s history of invention and innovation, making the United States the world leader in technological advancement. We need to focus on a ways to reduce the legal burden that comes with patents in order to re-democratize the process and allow small companies the ability to compete fairly in the marketplace.

I think that most of the media coverage of artificial intelligence gives the wrong impression of the current capabilities of the technology. The ideas behind the current crop of AI systems have been around for decades. Recent advances in computing power have made the approaches viable, but in my view these systems are really just glorified statistical models. The majority of AI products right now are not much more than linear regression. I do not mean to trivialize the complexity of the field; there are many interesting developments occurring in the space and systems like AlphaZero are certainly impressive. I think that there is a difference in perception between general AI and specialized AI that media coverage tends to downplay. While it is amazing that we can create a AI system to beat professional Go players, that same system is really only good that one thing. The methods used to train ML systems today do not seem to have the capability to create generalized intelligence. In that regard I think that much of the hype about AI is overblown.

            On the other hand, AI will still create large disruptive forces in society. Our current AI systems are very good at completing routine tasks, and can potentially automate many jobs that exist today. This is great for profits, but I believe society needs to be thinking more about how to take care of those who are affected by the growing wave of automation. I think that if used correctly, automation can remove the need to have humans completing menial tasks and free individuals to work on more interesting things. People still need to make a living however, and we need to ensure we aren’t leaving people out in the cold for the sake of higher profits. Perhaps a tax on profits generated due to automation advancements could be put in place to help provide job training programs for workers. In any case, I believe we need to place more of an emphasis on this problem and find solutions that provide individuals with dignified work.

            Another concern is that all of the gains from automation will concentrate in the hands of the few. As technology continues to make an impact on the economy, the demand for high skill jobs increases. Simultaneously, the demand for middle level jobs decreases as they are automated away. If all the wealth generated from automation stays in the hands of large corporations, everyday workers will be left without a way to provide for themselves. Additionally, they will not be able to afford the kind of education that would qualify them for high level jobs.

            Overall, I believe that like most tools, if AI is used correctly it will provide great benefits to society. Of course, there are potential challenges posed by the technology as well. In order to solve these challenges we need to have an increased focus on good public policy to ensure that the automation benefits society at large. Additionally, we should think about designing systems that work for humans, instead of the other way around.

Free speech is a crucial component of free and open societies. Democracy relies on strong free speech protections to encourage public discourse. In my view, one of the beautiful aspects of American life is its tendency to consistently face unpalatable ideas and reject them. When a hateful group holds a rally in a town and the community comes together to counter-protest in large numbers that reaffirms the commitment of the public to act morally and demonstrates the weakness of hateful ideologies. As Judge Stewart R. Dazell wrote in his 1996 ruling on the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act, the resilience of our system is drawn from “the chaos and the cacophony of unfettered speech”. By censoring ideas, we tacitly give them credence. There is the sense that perhaps the idea is too powerful or dangerous to be heard, which in turn implies that it contains some degree of truth. Indeed, if the status quo is so threatened by an idea, perhaps the status quo is ultimately flawed.

That is why totalitarian governments fight so hard to repress free speech. Their systems rely on arguments that only hold water when their foundations are obscured. Hateful and authoritarian ideologies do not have strong logical cases. They are built on false premises, and are maintained through fear and intimidation rather than freely given support. Free governments therefore, must protect the speech of all individuals. By allowing hateful ideas to be spoken, we simultaneously weaken them. In may seem counter intuitive, but I strongly believe that suppressing these ideas makes them more dangerous. I would much rather pull them out into the light where all of their flaws can be clearly seen and rejected.

With that being said, completely unbridled free speech can have negative consequences. In cases where speech can lead to imminent harm it can be rightly restricted. The famous example of yelling fire in a crowded theater can be applied to the internet as well. Internet communications that directly lead to violence or harm should be restricted and removed. Individuals do not, and should not, have the right to say absolutely anything they like on the internet. I believe that we can find a practical middle ground between the extremes of unrestricted free speech and dictatorial censorship. This compromise allows us to protect individuals from harm while maintaining the tenets of a free and open public discourse.

Online censorship is a pragmatic step, required to prevent greater problems. However, in the process of safeguarding the well-being of individuals we must be vigilant of the dangers presented by restricting free speech. I believe we should err on the side of favoring the protection of free speech when we have cases that present gray areas. This will ensure that our democracy remains strong, and will maintain a free and open society. It will encourage public discourse and weaken hateful and authoritarian ideologies by exposing their flaws. Ultimately, I believe free speech is a testament to the strength and resilience of our democracy.

In my opinion, corporations have moral obligations that they need to uphold. Individuals working in corporations are certainly bound by ethical duties and the actions that corporations take are a result of the collective actions of individuals. Therefore, corporations are bound by the same moral rules that govern individuals. In my opinion, three main factors should regulate the ethical behavior of corporations. The first is the conscious of the individuals responsible for making decisions about what the corporation does. For example, a factory manager who allows his plant to pollute the environment and harm the local area has a moral obligation to prevent that pollution if possible. The second factor is a combination of social and economic pressure. If a corporation is doing unethical things they may face significant backlash from the public. Consumers have the option to boycott companies who do things they find unethical, and so to some extent corporations have an incentive to regulate their behavior according to the ethical guidelines followed by the public at large. There are certainly cases where this is not possible however. In the Microsoft anti-trust case for example, consumers did not really have other options to turn to in the operating system market. This brings me to the third factor, which is government regulation. When companies fail to act ethically and market conditions fail to allow consumers to exercise choice regulation is required. Anti-trust regulation, for example, helps to prevent corporations from unethically creating anti-consumer monopolies.

Let us consider some other cases where government intervention may be required. When a corporation makes products that can be dangerous, legislation is crucial. Take cars for example. Corporations can make more profit by leaving out safety features. Although this is unethical, if consumers do not have alternative choices for transportation they will be forced to buy a car without safety features. Legislating the mandatory inclusive of certain safety features like seatbelts and crumple zones can help save lives when corporations do not have an incentive to provide safety features.

There is also the question of who corporations should do business with. Should corporations refrain from selling products to unethical organizations? In my view, corporations should do their best to anticipate the consequences of doing business with immoral parties and refrain from dealings that result in unethical outcomes. For example, the work that IBM did for the Nazi regime for example was certainly immoral and should not have been done. As an individual, sometimes you have to make sacrifices to live up to your ethical standards. Businesses have the same responsibility.

In conclusion, businesses should be held to the same ethical standards as individuals. The individuals making decisions for the business should be responsible for the ethical ramifications of their collective actions. Corporations should be held to an ethical standard by the morals of their employees and social pressure from the public, in addition to government legislation. Businesses should be expected to sacrifice profits in the pursuit of acting ethically. When they fail to meet this standard they should be held responsible by legislation.

The advent of the digital age has brought the debate about where to draw line between individual privacy and national security into clear focus. The nature of the problem is fairly simple. If you protect digital information with strong encryption it prevents bad actors from accessing that information. It has the drawback of preventing law enforcement from accessing that same information in the event that they need it for investigative purposes. Individuals want to keep their data safe and private, while law enforcement wants to have access to the information that they need to prevent crime. Technology companies cannot provide both parties with what they want. If they cater to the government then they expose their customer’s data. If they go down the route of total privacy, then the government loses the ability to access the information they want.

So which choice leaves our society in a better position? The government’s stance is that we can have encryption that is safe enough for most users, while still allowing law enforcement to access data when they have the legal authority. This seems fairly reasonable at first glance. Most citizens do not have a need for industrial strength locks on their homes, so why would they need the digital analog for their data? This comparison misses the fact that digital data is vulnerable to many more bad actors than physical locations. You have to worry about every hacker in the world, not just the burglars in your neighborhood or city. Weakening encryption results in a dramatic loss of data privacy for individuals when viewed in this light.

Additionally, worrying about “Big Brother” is a valid concern. You only have to look at the use of mass surveillance in a country like China to see how dangerous it can be to give governments total control over their citizen’s data. One would hope that strong institutions and democratic traditions could responsibly use the tool of mass surveillance but once the cat is out of the bag it can’t be taken back. Living in a country where you are constantly tracked and monitored is not desirable.

I think that for those reasons technology companies should continue to make user privacy a priority. With that being said, they do have an obligation to do their best to cooperate with law enforcement. I also think that there may be technical solutions to the problem of sharing information when it is needed. Engineers need to consider the ramifications of a completely encrypted service. While it protects the average user’s privacy it also enables bad actors to communicate freely. Software developers need to consider whether or not they are comfortable with a platform that protects potential criminal activity. If no technical solution can provide individuals with the necessary level of privacy while simultaneously allowing law enforcement access we need to make a difficult choice. I think overall, the damage done by weakening encryption would be worse than the damage done by giving law enforcement less information. If we weaken encryption, law enforcement could access data but so could every hacker. For that reason, I believe that user privacy should be paramount for technology companies.

Engineering disasters are largely failures of leadership. In some cases, they may be due to technical errors that no one could have foreseen but in general disasters are the result of a culture that discourages speaking out when problems arise. Usually, individuals feel that they have a duty to correct issues, or at the very least point them out so corrective measures can be taken. When an organization is under external pressure individuals may be ignored in order to preserve the status quo. We saw this in the Challenger incident, where engineers at the company responsible for the rockets had concerns but the external pressure to launch was so great that they did not veto the mission.

Again, I see this as a cultural issue. NASA’s priority in this situation should always be the safety of the astronauts. Once the launch schedule become the most important goal the culture shifted to assuming that things were safe. The burden of proof for proving the O-Rings would work at lower temperatures should have been on the people claiming that they were safe, not the engineers who were worried. I understand that you need to accept some level of risk in order to get things done but the risk they were taking was too high, especially since they had documented concerns about the O-Rings for some time.

I don’t believe that engineers, software developers or technology workers need to speak the truth in all cases. For example, when information is classified, individuals should not disclose that information when asked, even if that is not entirely truthful. I also think that NDA’s are reasonable to some extent. When knowledge of a technology would help a competitor then it is acceptable for a company to restrict employees from discussing that technology outside of the company. These situations are exceptions to the rule however. Most of the time engineers have a moral obligation to be truthful, especially when it concerns the safety of others. In general, transparency increases security and safety so I believe that organizations have a moral duty to carefully consider what information needs to be restricted.

That raises the question of who decides where the line is between withholding information and giving individuals information that they might need. In cases of national security for example, information is ideally classified to protect citizens. When a whistleblower discloses sensitive information outside of dedicated whistleblower channels they break the trust that the organization has in them and also jeopardize the trust that other individuals have in the organization. In order for this breach of trust to be justified the whistleblower must have a solid reason for the disclosure of information. In my opinion, this could potentially be justified when lives are in danger.

Whistleblowing requires a tremendous amount of courage. Most of the time the individuals who become whistleblowers do so out of a sense of moral duty. They feel like they need to let others know what they know or they wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. Ideally, we should endeavor to create organizations that respond to concerns to eliminate the need for whistleblowers. At the very least, organizations and the government should have dedicated channels for whistleblowers to empower concerned people to address problems. In extreme cases we should be prudent in our judgement of whistleblowers who disclose information to the public and measure their breach of trust against their motivations.

Communities are more effective when they are welcoming and inclusive. They are also more effective when they have a diversity of thought and experiences. Welcoming and inclusive environments encourage and foster diversity by bringing a wider range of people into the community. Diversity improves the effectiveness of organizations by enabling them to tackle problems with a wider lens. By bringing different perspectives to the table, diversity increases the odds that novel solutions to problems can be conceived and implemented. For organizations who wish to accomplish their goals, fostering diversity should certainly be a goal.

On another level, creating welcoming environments is part of respecting the human dignity of individuals. From this level of understanding I believe that it is a moral imperative to care about others and treat them well.

It is important to consider that diversity goes beyond what I think is the popular view currently. Diversity is about having diversity of thought. The way to achieve that is to bring people with different backgrounds and experiences together. Oftentimes the conversation about diversity begins and ends at superficial traits like race and gender. It is crucial to understand that it is the varied experiences of people across racial, gender and socioeconomic lines that creates the diversity of thought that strengthens communities and organizations. With this understanding we avoid distilling people down into stereotypes and categories and retain an appreciation of their unique individual experience.

Tolerance seems to be a crucial part of creating diverse and welcoming environments. Individuals need to respect their peers and the perspectives they bring with them. Tolerance is what allows people to overcome the friction of disagreement in order to cooperate and collaborate.

The idea of tolerance can also pose challenges for creating diverse environments. How tolerant should we be of intolerant ideas? I’m not sure exactly how to answer that question but I think it requires us to apply our values and morals to decide what is a healthy disagreement and what arguments are made in bad faith.

In my experience, computing has been welcoming and inclusive. However, I acknowledge that as a white male my experience is mostly likely very different from the experiences of others in the industry. Both of the companies I have interned at had a heavy focus on creating welcoming and inclusive environments. While I always felt welcome I don’t know for sure that all of my coworkers did. I think that oftentimes the structures that companies create cannot address smaller but still significant challenges for individuals with different backgrounds. Building a positive culture at a company can take a long time and I do think the technology industry has a lot of work to do, although in general they are heading in the right direction.

Overall, I believe that we have a moral duty to create welcoming environments in order to respect the dignity of individuals. In addition, this creates more effective communities. Technology companies should do more to foster diversity and inclusion because current initiatives do not go far enough. Building  lasting cultures of inclusion is difficult but I think we are making good progress.

I think the hiring process for technology companies gets a lot of flack but I think it accomplishes the purpose it was designed for. Companies don’t mind missing out on qualified candidates as much as they want to avoid hiring candidates who would be a bad fit. They’d much rather minimize false positives while rejecting individuals who would be qualified over accepting more people, some of who might not be good fits.

While I personally don’t love the coding trivia style technical interviews, I do think that most people who pass them are qualified software engineers. Not necessarily because the coding tests reflect any specific technical knowledge but because they require a lot of practice that ensures the candidate is dedicated to learning. My own personal experience followed this kind of trajectory. At first I was not very good at technical interviews. I took a while to complete even easier problems and was not super confident. Two years ago I decided to just practice coding problems every day. I worked through almost 200 problems in a summer and by the end of the summer felt really confident in my interviewing ability. I don’t think that doing these problems really improved my ability to write real world software, but I do think that it built my discipline.

After you work through enough problems on leetcode and hackerrank you start to see the coding problems as an easier challenge and interviews become less stressful. I think that being very prepared for these kinds of questions defintily pays off. In my experience it flips the interview when you are confident. Instead of worrying about what the company thinks you can be confident in your skills and decide whether the company is a good fit for you.

As far as Notre Dame goes, I think I had to learn most of my interview prep skills outside of the classes I took. All of the technical interviews I had mostly focused on either coding problems, side projects or design. I don’t think that the role of the CS department is necessarily to teach how to pass interviews however. I do think I have learned valuable skills at Notre Dame, but the nature of the game for interviewing is that you have to put in more work outside of class if you want to be successful.

My favorite interviews have been ones where I get a chance to write some code on my own for a period of time and then talk through it with a member of the company that I am interviewing with. I also enjoy design interviews, where you talk through a design with an interviewer. Both types of interviews are more like real world engineering where you can justify your decisions and explain them. I would like to see interviews move away from the pure coding challenge model.

If I could give a younger version of me advice I would probably say to aim higher earlier. I don’t regret anything but I probably could have explored more opportunities earlier on in my college career if I had known more about the CS industry.

I do think that the hiring process is pretty fair. I feel like I know what is expected of me and just have to practice until I hit that bar. Recruiting is a really hard problem for companies to solve and I think that the process we have now is decent for companies and individuals looking for jobs.

I tend to think of identity in two parts. The first is your identity relative to your own experience, your personal identity. This is a multi-faceted and complicated amalgamation of your various interests, ideas, and experience. It forms the basis for your view of yourself and also allows you to interpret and integrate new information and experiences against a backdrop of your personality. The second part is your identity relative to the experiences of others. This is harder to quantify because it is effectively the sum of the experiences that other individuals have had of you. Each individual has their own fragments of interactions with you, and when combined they create a shared external conception of your identity.

The struggle to create a harmony between these two conceptions is central to the issue of identity. The external identity that others see you through will never entirely match the complicated personal identity that you have for yourself. It is easier to create simple categories that people fall into than it is to hold all of the intricacies of their personality in your mind.

When it comes to technology stereotypes, the same concepts apply for me. I definitely personally identify with certain aspects of some stereotypes, but I also do not feel that I manifest entire stereotypes. In my experience it is almost impossible to distill any individual down to a stereotype. I am interested in math and computer science and find them fun to learn about. I program for fun sometimes. I am also a huge tennis fan and enjoy being social. These traits don’t fit into a single stereotype.

I do think that I manifest more Notre Dame stereotypes than technology stereotypes. I care about school, probably over-schedule myself, and I am a huge ND football fan. I think that as I have spent more time at Notre Dame I have taken on more of the traits of a “stereotypical” Notre Dame student, which is an interesting example of environment affecting identity.

Privilege also plays an important part in the formation of a personal identity. I think you have to acknowledge all the advantages you have had when considering your identity. A popular American trope is the individual who built themselves out of nothing. While I appreciate the lesson about the value of hard work that this trope provides, it glosses over the difficulties that many people face everyday. I try to cultivate a sense of gratitude for the privileges that I have had while keeping in mind that others may not have had the same opportunities as me.

Overall, I believe that it is important to cultivate a strong sense of personal identity in order to guide you through the world. Working to avoid simplifying others down to stereotypes and cultivating a sense a gratitude both lead to more effective and altruistic senses of identity. As a Notre Dame student, I do feel a sense of duty to use my gifts to help others, and my identity is tied to that idea.

For me, being an ethically responsible person is something I strive for. In my experience it manifests as a feeling of incompleteness if I don’t focus on it. Unlike other goals, like doing well in school and staying fit, attaining a level of ethical responsibility is less defined. It is hard for me to measure how ethical I am overall. In school you can look to grades, for running you can look at your times, for tennis you can see your results in the matches you play but my ethical performance lacks similar metrics. I’m not sure if it is even possible to quantify how ethical someone is. More often I find that you can tell when something is unethical. Certain actions give you an uneasy feeling and I usually rely on my intuitions to tell me if something is morally correct. Many times I find that my “reasoning” about the ethical ramifications of an action is really just a justification for my initial judgement.

I do think that most people are in agreement about most ethical issues. In almost every community around the world, regardless of culture, things like murder are universally deemed to be unethical. Interesting ethical cases, where reasonable people can disagree, challenge us to give more structure to our intuitions in order to justify our views. Personally, I like to think about things from both a utilitarian viewpoint and a Kantian perspective. The challenge is to find a theory that gels with my intuitions all of the time. When utilitarianism allows us to justify terrible actions for the greater good, that feels wrong. When Kantian thinking makes unreasonable demands on individuals to adhere to strict laws that also feels wrong. Here again it’s easier to tell when something is wrong, but very hard to determine rules for correctness.

In terms of computer science and technology, I am concerned that the systems we are currently building will not be equitable and fair. I was reading an article about new essay grading technology that attempts to use machine learning models to grade student submissions without instructor feedback. One ramification of this approach was that the models gave a weight to the range of vocabulary used in the essay. In the training set, essays that used more words tended to score higher. Students with a wider range of vocabulary tend to come from more privileged backgrounds. The algorithm created similar proxies for what made a good essay along various other lines. The end result was that the models did not look at the logical arguments laid out in the paper but instead discriminated dis-proportionally against students from lower socio-economic classes. The idea that an impartial computer system could negatively impact the futures of students based on factors out of their control is incredibly scary.

I think all computer scientists have a duty to understand how their work can impact others. If we don’t focus on building equitable and ethical systems now, we might cause societal issues that could take decades to resolve. We have an amazing opportunity to create systems that can amplify the ideas of others and give individuals social mobility that is unparalleled across most of human history. That comes with the danger of entrenching current societal problems in our computing systems, increasing the difficulty of every resolving them. I’m hopeful that we can do the former and not the latter.