A question of ethics in open designs

Donna Lindskog - July 13, 2016

Some ethics questions are black and white. Others, like in the case of the power industry who have good intentions to create an open design for their new smart grid, are more complicated than that.

There must be integrity and if you set out to deceive (such as the programmer for the Volkswagen engine tuning software that covertly changed during emission testing) then we can say there has been a breach of ethics. But other ethics statements are about being competent and doing good quality work. In some of these cases, we have to look at intentions as much as anything to see if ethics have been breached. I found myself thinking about this when I saw what was happening with the smart grid – an electricity supply network that uses digital communications technology to detect and react to local changes in usage.

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