[[chapter_ethics]]

Data Ethics

This chapter was co-authored by Dr. Rachel Thomas, the cofounder of fast.ai, and founding director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco. It largely follows a subset of the syllabus she developed for the course.

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Because deep learning is such a powerful tool and can be used for so many things, it becomes particularly important that we consider the consequences of our choices. The philosophical study of ethics is the study of right and wrong, including how we can define those terms, recognize right and wrong actions, and understand the connection between actions and consequences. The field of data ethics has been around for a long time, and there are many academics focused on this field. It is being used to help define policy in many jurisdictions; it is being used in companies big and small to consider how best to ensure good societal outcomes from product development; and it is being used by researchers who want to make sure that the work they are doing is used for good, and not for bad.

As a deep learning practitioner, therefore, it is likely that at some point you are going to be put in a situation where you need to consider data ethics. So what is data ethics? It’s a subfield of ethics, so let’s start there.

In answering the question “What Is Ethics”, The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics says that the term refers to:

There is no list of right answers. There is no list of do and don’t. Ethics is complicated, and context-dependent. It involves the perspectives of many stakeholders. Ethics is a muscle that you have to develop and practice. In this chapter, our goal is to provide some signposts to help you on that journey.

This chapter is certainly not the only part of the book where we talk about data ethics, but it’s good to have a place where we focus on it for a while. To get oriented, it’s perhaps easiest to look at a few examples. So, we picked out three that we think illustrate effectively some of the key topics.