5.1 Beneficial and Harmful Effects

Enduring Understanding

While computing innovations are typically designed to achieve a specific purpose, they may have unintended consequences.

Learning Objective

Explain how an effect of a computing innovation can be both beneficial and harmful.

Essential Knowledge

People create computing innovations.

The way people complete tasks often changes to incorporate new computing innovations.

Not every effect of a computing innovation is anticipated in advance.

A single effect can be viewed as both beneficial and harmful by different people, or even by the same person.

Advances in computing have generated and increased creativity in other fields, such as medicine, engineering, communications, and the arts.

Learning Objective

Explain how a computing innovation can have an impact beyond its intended purpose.

Essential Knowledge

Computing innovations can be used in ways that their creators had not originally intended:

§ The World Wide Web was originally intended only for rapid and easy exchange of information within the scientific community.

§ Targeted advertising is used to help businesses, but it can be misused at both individual and aggregate levels.

§ Machine learning and data mining have enabled innovation in medicine, business, and science, but information discovered in this way has also been used to discriminate against groups of individuals

Some of the ways computing innovations can be used may have a harmful impact on society, the economy, or culture.

Responsible programmers try to consider the unintended ways their computing innovations can be used and the potential beneficial and harmful effects of these new uses.

It is not possible for a programmer to consider all the ways a computing innovation can be used.

Computing innovations have often had unintended beneficial effects by leading to advances in other fields.

Rapid sharing of a program or running a program with a large number of users can result in significant impacts beyond the intended purpose or control of the programmer.