ABSTRACT
As information technology evolves and machines begin to design and build other machines, the issue of human control gains greater significance. However, some concepts may be so central to humanness that any attempt to embody them in computer processing might undermine the ability of humanity to control its own fate. Once any resulting standards reach a degree of maturity, legislatures in the many hundreds of legal jurisdictions throughout the world would probably have to devise enforcement procedures. Information technologists need to communicate to legislators the importance of revising and extending the laws that assign liability for harm arising from the use of information technology. Associations of information technology professionals, such as the IEEE Computer Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, the British Computer Society, and the Australian Computer Society, are concerned with professional standards, and these standards almost always include a code of ethics. The difficulties identified are therefore directly and immediately relevant to information technology professionals.
