Impacts of Computing and Professional Practice
Core concepts
Understand the social, legal, and ethical dimensions of computing: digital divide and access, automation and employment, privacy and surveillance, intellectual property (copyright, patents, licensing such as open source), data protection principles, and environmental costs of computing (energy, e-waste). Know professional frameworks: codes of conduct, whistleblowing, informed consent, accessibility standards, and the role of legislation. Recognise ethical risks in algorithms-bias in training data, lack of transparency, accountability gaps-and the importance of stakeholder analysis. Be able to evaluate a scenario from multiple perspectives (user, developer, employer, society) and justify a recommendation with evidence.
Traps
- Copyright protects expression, not ideas; a patent protects inventions.
- Open-source software is not the same as public domain-licences impose conditions.
- "Legal" is not the same as "ethical"; questions reward identifying both dimensions.
- Algorithmic bias often originates in data, not in malicious code.
- Accessibility is a legal and ethical requirement, not an optional feature.
Worked example
A hospital deploys an AI triage tool trained mostly on data from one demographic. Identify impacts: under-representation may cause poorer predictions for others (bias); patients lack transparency about how decisions are made; clinicians remain accountable. Recommendation: audit the training data, add human oversight, and publish evaluation results. Rule of thumb: for any impact question, name the stakeholders, the benefit, the harm, and a mitigation-four sentences that earn full marks.