City Research Online

Abstract

In recent years, we have seen many examples of software products unintentionally causing demonstrable harm. Many guidelines for ethical and responsible computing have been developed in response. Dominant approaches typically attribute liability and blame to individual companies or actors, rather than understanding how the working practices, norms, and cultural understandings in the software industry contribute to such outcomes. In this paper, we propose an understanding of responsibility that is infrastructural, relational, and cultural; thus, providing a foundation to better enable responsible software engineering into the future. Our approach draws on Young's (2006) social connection model of responsibility and Star and Ruhleder's (1994) concept of infrastructure. By bringing these theories together we introduce a concept called infrastructural injustice, which offers a new way for software engineers to consider their opportunities for responsible action with respect to society and the planet. We illustrate the utility of this approach by applying it to an Open-Source software communities’ development of Deepfake technology, to find key leverage points of responsibility that are relevant to both Deepfake technology and software engineering more broadly.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of ORBIT. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	Responsible software engineering, Infrastructure, Social connection model of responsibility, Installed base, Deepfake technology
Subjects:	T Technology > T Technology (General)
Departments:	School of Science & Technology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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