Chapter 15 • Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues 591systems, and they can choose to consider or to ignore
quality-of-working-life issues in deciding among possi-
ble alternative designs.
Furthermore, IT has facilitated global outsourcing of
work. Were it not for IT, help desks and IS programming
activities for companies in developed countries like the
United States could not be located in Asian countries or
other offshore locations. From the perspective of a corpo-
ration’s bottom line, outsourcing these IT tasks—and other
IT-driven business tasks such as accounting, claim pro-
cessing, and payroll processing—has been very beneficial,
but from the perspective of many workers in developed
countries, it has been disruptive.
The ethical question then becomes: Are workers
merely one factor of production or are they worthy of
further consideration because they are citizens of a spe-
cific country? This question is applicable far beyond the
impact of IT and is of continuing importance throughout
the world. What, if any, legal protection should be
provided for workers is a continuing ethical and legal
question.
The Future
As we have seen, the pervasive growth of IT has presented
a number of vexing social, legal, and ethical problems.
For the foreseeable future it is clear that computers will
continue to get faster, more powerful, and less costly, just
as they have over the past 50 years. The question is: What
will individuals and organizations do with all the
increased IT power that will be available for less and less
money?
The computer was first used as a big, fast calculator,
but soon it began to support decision making in well-
structured but complex areas, such as deciding how to
segment a customer base or how to minimize the cost of
materials while still meeting government regulations. In
the military, command and control systems based on IT
have allowed humans and computers to share complex
analysis and decision-making tasks, with both computers
and humans doing what each does best. However, just as
the industrial revolution replaced human and animal mus-
cle power with machines, and in the process caused painful
dislocations to displaced workers, IT has also enabled the
downsizing of organizations—in this case, by streamlining
processes, automating tasks, and providing visibility to
data, when and where it is needed.
Today the computer can also take the place of
humans in areas where we always thought that human
brainpower was required. Expert systems are commonly
used in troubleshooting applications from automobile
maintenance to medical diagnosis, and neural networks
are routinely used to sift through mountains of data and
discover relationships that humans probably would not be
able to find. In May 1997, Deep Blue, an IBM supercom-
puter with very sophisticated software developed by a
long-term IBM-sponsored research project, finally beat
the reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a
challenge match. In 2010, IBM demonstrated a system
called Watson that plays Jeopardy—a game which
involves deciphering puzzling clues about unlimited
trivia—and does so quite competitively in real time
against human contestants. Although the field of artificial
intelligence (AI) has advanced far more slowly than some
predicted in its early days, it is now clear that the com-
puter is capable of competing with humans in surprising
arenas. IT is also intertwined with other exciting techno-
logical developments: Robotics, nanotechnology, and
genetic engineering all have exciting possibilities for
improving human life, but they could also lead to some
unintended consequences.
So what new social and ethical issues will the future
bring? We have no clear answers to this question, but we
are confident that business and IT managers will need to
continue to address the types of issues discussed in this
chapter.Review Questions
1.What is meant by the term identity theft? What can happen to
a person who is the victim of identity theft?
2.Why is a person’s social security number (or other personal
identifier) so valuable that someone might steal it?
3.Describe the services provided by a credit reporting serv-
ice such as Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. How are
these services provided?
4.What do U.S. laws require a financial company to do in regard
to sharing information that it has collected on its customers?5.What is the difference between a copyright and a patent on
a computer program?
6.In reference to a company sharing information that it
has collected about a customer, what is meant by “opt
in”? By “opt out”? In your opinion, which of these is
preferable?
7.Has IT created an ethical problem for you or someone you
know? Explain.