Neutrality Yale STEM contemplates ethics BY KATHERINE CHOU
JOHN DALLARD ’22 had “heard about the deaths and racial incidents with law enforcement, not just this year, but [in] so many previous years, too.” This time, however, was different. As a Computer Science major and the vice president of Yale’s National Society of Black Engineers, Dallard has long thought about the consequences of the technology he works with and the impact it will have on others. But this year’s COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests against systemic racism have prompted Dallard to reexamine the intersections between ethics and STEM. “This year, being at home, being stuck in quarantine, there’s not much else to focus on except the state of the world,” Dallard reflected in an interview with The Politic. “It has made me really think, ‘How do I want to go about my career and goals with my education? How can I use my Computer Science degree and knowledge to truly effect change?’” It is a common perception that science and politics exist as dichotomous entities. But 2020 has shown that it is impossible to separate COVID-19 from Black Lives Matter or the elec8
tion from vaccines. Science informs political actions, and politics influence which scientific developments are prioritized. As America looks to technology to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic, coronavirus disparities across marginalized groups have underscored the need for racial justice-oriented perspectives in science and tech. Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities have been disproportionately burdened not only with COVID-19 cases and deaths, but also limited access to digital resources. Contact-tracing apps, designed for people who can afford to separate themselves from work and community, have ultimately presented surveillance pitfalls and caused tangential harms to marginalized communities. False positives pose the most harm to lower-income workers who are forced to weigh losing their income or job against their health and safety based on inaccurate warnings. These apps have also raised concerns that they normalize surveillance, which has commonly been applied to marginalized communities, and that sensitive health and social networking data collected could
