By the middle of this course you can build things. That is a genuinely new power, and it arrives with a question that “can I?” cannot answer: should this exist? Not “is it legal”, not “is it difficult” — should somebody make it. The question is uncomfortable precisely because the answer is sometimes no, including for ideas that would be fun to build.
Four proposals. All are buildable by someone in this room, this year.
The attendance camera
A program that photographs the room each period and marks who is present. It saves a teacher four minutes a day. It also builds a permanent record of where every student’s face was, every hour, which did not exist yesterday. Who would have to agree? Who could ask for it to be deleted, and would anyone be listening?
The ranking bot
A program that sorts every student in a club by their contribution score, publicly. Everything it uses is already visible. Does gathering visible things into one ranked list create something new — and does the person who comes last get a say?
The homework predictor
Feed in a student’s past marks and it predicts their final grade. Suppose it is accurate 80 percent of the time. Who sees the prediction? What happens to the 20 percent — and what happens to a student who is told, in week two, what they will become?
The helpful scraper
A program that collects a local organisation’s public event listings so people can search them. Helpful, obviously — but nobody asked the organisation, the listings arrive stripped of context, and their phone starts ringing about events that ended last month.
Questions worth arguing about:
- Which of the four would you refuse to build, and what is the principle behind your refusal? State it in one sentence that would also cover a case you have not thought of yet.
- “If I don’t build it, somebody else will.” Is that an argument, or an excuse? Does it change anything about your responsibility?
- Every one of these has a version that is fine. Find it. What changed — consent, scope, who holds the data, who can say stop?
- Who should decide: the builder, the users, the people affected who are not users, or somebody else entirely? What happens when those four disagree?
- Is there a difference between building something and deploying it? Between deploying it and defending it once it causes harm?
For your own work the test is practical and it applies to The Community App directly: could you explain your program, in full, to every person it touches — and would they still agree? If the answer depends on them not finding out, you already know. The groundwork for this is When Code Hurts; the wider view is Computers and Society.