TidyBlocks: The Hippocratic License
Over the past few years,
more and more people have become concerned with
the ethical implications of work in data science and machine learning.
From algorithmic bias to facial recognition,
the tools we teach people to build and use have the potential to do great harm;
as teachers,
we have a responsibility to make our students aware of the issues
in the same way that the medical profession teaches nurses and doctors
to think about the human implications of what they do.
One example of how we can do this comes up when we discuss software licensing and intellectual property.
Until recently,
researchers had three principal options:
-
Make their work closed source, so that others could not use it without permission.
-
Use the MIT License or something equivalent,
which allows users to do whatever they want.
-
Use the GNU Public License (GPL),
which allows users to do what they want
but also requires them to share the source of any project
that modifies or incorporates GPL'd software.
A fourth option has recently been developed
by Coraline Ada Ehmke,
who is best known until now for creating the Contributor Covenant
used by many open source projects.
Like other open licenses,
the Hippocratic License allows people to use and share the software,
but where the GPL requires them to share their own work,
the Hippocratic License prevents anyone from using the software to do harm.
To avoid wrangling over what exactly that means,
the license specifically forbids anyone from using software in ways that violate
the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
and the United Nations Global Compact.
These are regarded as landmarks in the history of human rights,
and more practically,
have been ratified by many countries
and argued over by lawyers and scholars
so that their scope and meaning is clear.
Making students aware of the Hippocratic License
and adopting it for our own projects
is a small step toward a better world,
but it is a step.
From a teaching point of view,
discussing it and its implications can turn an otherwise abstract lecture on ethics
into a lively debate,
and can give students practice discussing what they should do
rather than what they could do.
*This post originally appeared on [the RStudio Education blog](https://education.rstudio.com/blog/2020/08/hippocratic-license/).*
— Greg Wilson / 2020-08-14