Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 04/89 - checked

April 1989

The ancient scribe had been sitting at the desk for too long (any thoughts that might pass your mind that this refers to me will be instantly met by libel, slander and blue serge suits). The knarled hand had started to ache from the endless cartographising (that is for our American readers) of mystic runes.

They meant something, these runes, and they seemed to have an effect on life for the people that either understood, or at least believed that they understood that they believed what they meant. They were happy (or not, depending upon what the runes said).

As the scribe looked up from the desk, wearily, there came into view the bane of all unusual civilisations, the young, western anthropologist, who took one look at what was going on and decided that a computerised version of the runes would not only explain them better, but would also help the scribe to write better, more accurate runes in the future.

The question is, should the anthropologist butt in, or butt out? There you go, an Eleven-Plus question in ethics for those in and around a technology that is just about reaching that level of intellect.

I pose it because the question of ethics in computing is starting to rear its aesthetically urbane little head. It has come up in a couple of areas, such as the development and use of expert systems, and in the application and use of computer technology in assisting, or otherwise, non-western cultures that may or may not have a place for such help.

In the latter category comes the island of Bali. Anyone who saw the Channel 4 TV series, 'Fragile Earth' will have seen a film on this Western ideal of Paradise, and how an American anthropologist was making extensive use of Apple Macintosh computers to discover how a religion based on a water Goddess worked to control the irrigation of the island's rice crop.

However it was done, the effect was successful. The Balians had managed to live for many centuries in productive harmony with the environment, obtaining several crops of rice a year from the same fields, without recourse to either artificial fertilisers or insecticides.

Why was the anthropologist interested, and why use any computer to prove some points? The answer, though not shown in the film, is that Bali is now part of Indonesia, which is a) Muslim and b) seeking cash crops for export. The religious problems come from the simple observation that every religion which is based on the concept of a single deity has, as a fundamental tenet, the crucial concept that that single deity must, of course, be right. The Balians, being a mixture of Hindu and Buddhist (and thus multi-deistic in belief) must, therefore, be wrong.

Couple that to the need for cash-crops, a common occurrence in third-world countries that have been over-sold development loans, and one can see why the Indonesian Government looked at Bali, saw it productive and decided that, with 'better' management of its irrigation, it could become a great source of more rice as a cash crop.

Needless to say, they messed up the island's agriculture by ignoring the influence of the religion on rice production, soil fertility and pest control (for the latter one favourite control method is so simple it hurts - ducks, they eat the pests).

So, the ethical question for the anthropologist is this, should a computer be used to demonstrate to both sides how the religious rituals control the irrigation and subsequent rice production, or is it the imposition of arrogant western techno-culture where it is not needed? The question is important because such arrogant imposition has been the norm for that last couple of centuries, and the results have not generally been favourable (for the locals, anyway).

With computer technology becoming more gutsy by the minute, we have the power to develop, as in this case, simulations which demonstrate not only what is happening, but what could happen on the old 'what if..' basis. But the rules by which the computer plays 'what if' are western: for the Balinese to change them means imposing western thought processes onto people in a culture where they probably do not fit.

And if that culture has knowledge vested in a religious context, then we really are on the verge of proving true the oldest of computer jokes: Programmer asks computer "is there a God?". Computer tells programmer "there is now".

This is why it interested me to see that, last year, the British Computer Society, the bastion of professional propriety in the DP business, had raised the question of ethics and expert systems. There are obvious legal problems to be faced in relying on the advice or activities of expert systems in life: for example, when something goes wrong do you sue the workstation which instructed you, the mainframe which ran the program, the company which owns the system or the programmers who wrote it?

But there are also deeper, more complex ethical questions of taking one set of conceptual and logical constructs and imposing them on other problems without consideration or understanding of the full nature of such problems. Bali is a good example of how it doesn't always work, and of how finding one solution to that initial error can open up a hornet's nest of other potential horrors.

Try it yourself. Sit at you PC and write a program which shows that your bank account is always in the black. Now try to use it to contradict your bank manager, arguing your case from an ethical standpoint.

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