Choosing our dreams

Technology is a means to fulfil our dreams, but how do we select which dreams? The question of whether a technology will actually work (whether it will do what we want it to) is, after all, distinct from whether the end is good. We need to reflect upon this basic question, because it runs to the heart of some of the most difficult debates we are facing. More precisely, we believe that computers present us with a whole raft of moral dilemmas, some old ones in new guises and some new ones. These dilemmas arise for several reasons:

1. Old questions appear in a new light, and our existing intellectual and legal frameworks for presenting the issues do not scale to the new situation. We can see that there are questions about how things ought to be done, and that the answers to those questions matter. However, our tools for handling these questions seem to lack purchase on the material we are dealing with; they were designed for other contexts. To take just one example, national laws don't work well in cyberspace, which knows no borders.

2. New dilemmas arise from the new technological possibilities that computers offer.If the transmission of data is absolutely safe and secure, beyond any possibility of interception, all sorts of dangerous possibilities may be opened up. How should we handle them? Should we restrict the availability of the encryption technology? (See Chapter 6.)

3. We have to grapple with whole new moral dimensions. While we can describe the new situations and possibilities we are presented with, we are not yet able to evaluate them.

4. It's all happening so fast. It takes a while to digest, debate, and form opinions about a new moral question, and time to learn from experience. Yet it seems that we hardly have time to appreciate the complexities of one, still less agree about what to do about it, before the next one is upon us.

Over the centuries we have evolved in Britain a sort of moral consensus about right and wrong. This broad consensus is embodied in our laws and embedded in our cultural assumptions. This consensus is not explicitly based on a Christian understanding, but it has evolved from one that certainly was. While a Christian might find certain aspects that he or she would like to change, the broad setting is largely in tune with Christianity: respect for persons, property and freedom, and condemnation of violence, discrimination and exploitation, and so on.

As time goes on, this shared moral consensus shifts, fragments and re-forms. Sometimes such adjustments are a response to changing attitudes (for example, towards gender), and sometimes they are in response to new situations (such as the industrial revolution, or immigration). However it happens, though, the process is usually rather gradual. We have developed a host of effective, albeit fallible, ways to debate and evolve such changes: through newspapers, magazines, books, elections, common law, and so on.

The interesting thing about computers is that they force us to re-evaluate significant areas of our shared moral consensus. Not only that, but they force us to do so so much faster than usual that our established mechanisms for evolving a new consensus are left far behind. Here are several examples:

• Computers store and share personal information. The law restricts access to computer-based medical and criminal information about individuals as it does with paper-based records. However, all other sorts of information, which was difficult to collate in a paper-based world, can now be efficiently gathered, assimilated and shared by computers. The Data Protection Act 1984 requires those with whom electronically stored data are to be shared to be registered at the time of entering the data. Companies, by dint of broad-brush registering, can accrue the right to pass on details they may hold about individuals. Hence an individual, once having given information about him- or herself to a company, for example through a customer satisfaction questionnaire, has released these details into cyberspace. They can then be made available, easily, to those who request it. Information of different sorts given to different companies can be correlated by means of identifiers such as postcode and surname. Personal profiles, created, added to and passed around in this way, erode our sense of privacy, independence and, above all, freedom.
  
  
• Computers can duplicate information at essentially no cost. In the physical world, it is not easy to replicate an object, but in cyberspace thousands of copies of data can be made on your home PC in seconds. This dramatic reduction in the cost of copying is placing immense strain on the legal framework of copyright. The point is not that we simply need to invent new laws. Rather, we first need to work out what is right and wrong in this new arena. (For example, many people who would think it hugely wrong to steal a bicycle from a shop do not find it wrong to take a copy of a software program that would be sold for hundreds of pounds.) Somehow the fact that the copy does not appear to cost the original owner anything, nor to deprive the owner of anything, shifts many people's moral balance.
  
  
• Computers offer new forms of 'free speech'. Our culture values freedom of speech very highly, and in many ways the Internet makes free speech freer. It is easier both to publish and to find information than hitherto. But not all speech is good. We accept a number of specific limitations to free speech, such as slander, libel, incitement to racial hatred, pornography and so on. The laws against such things are always controversial, but they don't affect many of us. The nature of physical media makes it possible to control access to offensive material; pornographic magazines must be placed on a high shelf. Such control is much more difficult in cyberspace. International boundaries are crossed, offensive material might be encrypted so that it is not easily recognizable, and so on. The Internet forces us to reopen the moral question of what should and should not be said in public.
  
  
• Computers are opaque and unpredictable. Much conventional technology (from bicycles to washing machines) is transparent and predictable: we can see how it works, predict what it will do and what it won't do, and have a go at fixing it if it breaks. Even something as complicated as an aeroplane is fairly predictable: if you put more cargo into it, it may fly a bit less well, and eventually it won't get off the ground; but it is most unlikely that the wings will suddenly fall off when you add a single matchstick.
  
  Computers are quite different. A computer is a completely opaque black box. Its workings are silent, hidden and, most of the time, flawless. For this reason, computers often inspire a sort of uncritical trust. But this trust is often misplaced: computers fail horribly, and (worse) entirely unpredictably, when they encounter a situation that their designers did not anticipate - the year 2000 problem is a notorious example. Very small changes in input, or very rare events, can cause complete and catastrophic failure.
  
  One could argue that this raises practical, rather than moral, questions. Is it a moral question if my car refuses to start because of a bug in its software? The wider dimension is this: the more pervasive computers are, the more trust we are forced to place in the perfection of the engineers that built them, and the less ability we have to respond flexibly to technological failure. How far do we want to move in that direction?
  
  
• Computers may become so integral to our lives and bodies that we literally cannot live without them. Nowadays you can carry a 'smart' identity card in your pocket, that opens the security doors of an office building. It is only a short step for that card to be implanted in your arm - so convenient, it never gets lost. Within the lifetime of many of us, computers will help blind people to see and deaf people to hear, by linking directly into their nervous systems. All of this is awesome, but troubling. Will the blind be seeing what is really there, or something else?

In each case, the pervasive influence of computers forces us to address moral questions. But since these questions fall outside the territory of our shared consensus we have to figure out right and wrong all over again. That in turn requires us to have a moral framework, and that is where Christians have something to offer.