Processing .....please wait.. 
The article has been forwarded.... 
'Technology needs to think about ethics': Damon Horowitz
By siliconindia
|
Monday, 16 May 2011, 20:28 IST
Bangalore: Damon Horowitz, Director of Engineering at Google said that the technology industry needs to think long and hard about ethics . He said that the technology maker should not think only about building products, but at the same time they should also think about the moral ethics. In TEDx Silicon Valley event at Stanford University, he spoke about how ethics are getting less significant in the tech world,reports VentureBeat.
Apart from an engineer at Google, Damon Horowitz has also done his Ph.D. in philosophy. In the event, Horowitz asked the attendees whether they prefer the iPhone or Android. Majority voted for the iPhone. As we all know that iPhone can track of the user's location to within a few hundred meters, without their permission. And then he asked whether it was a good idea to take data from a user's phone in order to provide various services. Then the audience disagrees with the phone maker's policy.
The technology-makers do not think about the morality of their products, they just build stuff and let other people worry about the ethics. Horowitz argued over the matter that technology makers should be thinking as much about their 'moral operating system' as their mobile operating system.
When coming to the philosopher's point of view, he discussed about how different philosophers have tried to evaluate morality. Horowitz said that ethics is hard and it requires thinking.
Horowitz said "That's the first step towards taking responsibility towards what we should do with all of our power, we have so much power today. It is up to us to figure out what to do."
