ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to explain why there is a tendency toward diminished accountability for the impacts, harms, and risks of computing, and it offers recommendations for reversing it. The practical implications of diminished accountability are tragically clear in the deaths and injuries at six different locations where Therac-25 accelerators were used Until the physicist Fritz Hager, at Tyler Hospital. Most computer systems in use today are the products not of single programmers working in isolation, but of groups, collectives, or corporations. They are produced by teams of diverse individuals, that might include designers, engineers, programmers, writers, psychologists. Computing is vulnerable to the obstacles of many hands because, First, as noted earlier, most software systems in use are produced in institutional settings, whether in small and middle-sized software development companies, or large corporations, government agencies and contractors, or educational institutions. Second, computer systems themselves—usually not monolithic—are constituted out of segments, or modules.
