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COMP_SCI 396: Computing, Ethics, and Society


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Prerequisites

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Description

Computing technologies shape our personal, social, and political lives in increasingly complex and consequential ways – providing tremendous benefits (e.g. convenient access to information, connecting to one another across time and space) and harms (e.g. biased decision-making, mass surveillance, disinformation campaigns, and exclusion from critical material opportunities) that are important to examine and understand.

At the same time, these technologies are born and shaped by the societies in which they are developed. Thus, grappling with the ethics of technologies (i.e considering the harms and benefits, how and why they were created in the first place, and how and to what ends they are used) is important not only for ultimately creating more moral technologies but a more moral society. Thus, our approach to the ethics of computing technologies requires a multifaceted assessment of their harm and benefit to our individual, cultural, and political lives, and simultaneously a critical examination of the values, ideologies, and contexts through which computing technologies emerge.

To accomplish this, we will engage in critical reading across a range of topics drawn from computer science and HCI, education and learning sciences, as well as ethics and philosophy. These readings and ideas will help us to:

  1. Recognize the value judgements and subjectivities that undergird a wide variety of technical practices (e.g. sampling, data collection practices, categorization and classification, prediction, system design, etc.).
  2. Examine the design choices and tradeoffs that various computing infrastructures make (and have made) in relation to important societal values (e.g. individual autonomy, free speech, equity, privacy, justice, security, access to opportunity, etc.).
  3. Consider some of the intended and unintended consequences of computing applications within our communities, institutions, and social systems (e.g. schooling, employment, policing, transportation, business, etc.). This involves paying attention to who wins and who loses, as well as how these technologies might amplify existing marginalities and privileges.
  4. Develop a variety of analytic lenses for examining computing technologies in terms of their social, ethical, and political consequences.

The course is open to all students. For CS majors, minors, and graduate students, the course aims to help students to consider and grapple with ethical dimensions of their work, in order to inform a more critical technical practice. For students coming into the class from other disciplinary vantage points, the course aims to provide a solid foundation for thinking about the possibilities, risks, and impacts of computer-mediated infrastructures on society.

The course format will consist of:

  1. Readings and in-class discussions.
  2. In-class activities to help students to consider the potential impacts of different kinds of technologies and design decisions.
  3. Reflective writing assignments that will ask you to analyze the social and ethical dimensions of contemporary technology debates.

COURSE COORDINATORS: 

COURSE INSTRUCTOR : Victoria Chavez & Natalie Araujo Melo