This class consists of:

Where we will discuss reading material for the week in lecture, and we will hear from guest lecturers and watch movies in our discussion section.

Lectures

Most lectures include a required reading assignment that is to be completed before class. In class, we will discuss the topic first in small groups and then as a class. I will provide a PDF version of the paper to be read and/or a link to a web version of the paper.

To signup to lead a discussion, please add yourself to this Google Doc for the lecture that you'd like to lead (there should be 1-2 students for each lecture). I sync the Google Doc and the course website periodically, so it might take a little bit of time for your addition to show up on the course website.

Date Topic Slides Required reading and assignment Optional reading and comments Discussion leader
Monday 1/8 [gdoc] Why ethics in technology? None Read on next entry what you need to do for Friday Watch an interesting video on the progression of information technologies. Do compare the Did you know? (2008) version with the Did you know (2016) version! Sam
Wednesday 1/10 [gdoc] Discuss the Terrell Bynum paper Read the History of Computer and Information Ethics [pdf] by Terrell Bynum Additional reading material: Sam
Friday 1/12 [gdoc] Discuss if we should allow students to take smart drugs Come to class prepared to debate both positions: "Yes, students should be allowed" and "No, students should not be allowed". Read Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy (Greely et al, 2008). Possible reading to support your arguments: Sam
Monday 1/15 No class, MLK Day None
Wednesday 1/17 [gdoc] Discuss if Apple should comply to the FBI Read the Apple letter to its customers about the case and the article from Wired magazine on The Apple-FBI fight is not about privacy versus security. Do not be misled.

Come to class prepared to debate both positions: "Yes, Apple should comply" and "No, Apple should not comply"		 Possible readings to support your arguments: Sam
Friday 1/19 [gdoc] Gender and bias in tech (a) Read Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women? [pdf] by Lizy Mundy (2017). (b) Read Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber by James Damore (2017). (c) spend an hour or so to research reaction to (b) and to form your own opinion on it. Listen to The Edge of Gender by Shankar Vedantam (2017). Sam
Monday 1/22 [gdoc] MQI Read Dyson's lecture on technology and social justice (1997) Final paper Milestone 1 due Sam
Wednesday 1/24 [gdoc] Dangers of tech: television Read How television dims the mind, Chapter 10 of the book "Four arguments for the elimination of television by Jerry Mander, 1978. Read Books vs. TV: How They Stack Up Against One Another and Box of tricks Kendall Lui
Friday 1/26 [gdoc] Dangers of tech: Google Read the paper "Is Google making us stupid?" by Nicholas Carr as well as the article: How Google is making us smarter by Carl Zimmer. Write a summary report (max. one page). Turn it in via Canvas before lecture Read Google Isn't Making Us stupid...Or Smart and Google Effects On Memory Nathalia Sandoval and Darick McBride
Monday 1/29 [gdoc] Dangers of tech: Social media Read report from the World's Economic Forum on social media (2016). Read Everything We Know About Facebook's Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment Kim Dang and Jason Liang
Wednesday 1/31 [gdoc] Dangers of tech: smartphones Read: (a) Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? by J. Twenge (2017); (b) Your Addiction to Social Media is No Accident by J. Morgans (2017); (c) How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind by T. Harris (2016); and listen to the Fresh Air audio (d) ‘Irresistible’ by Design (2017). Read Adolescents’ Electronic Media Use at Night, Sleep Disturbance, and Depressive Symptoms in the Smartphone Age and The dark side of smartphone usage: Psychological traits, compulsive behavior and technostress Nathan McCall and Max Nedorezov
Friday 2/2 [gdoc] AI (a) Read Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us (2000) by Bill Joy. (b) Read a response to this, Promise and Peril (2001) by Ray Kurzweil. Read ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEEKS AN ETHICAL CONSCIENCE and The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the Threat to our Human Rights Mat Magno
Monday 2/5 [gdoc] Gig economy Read: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death from The New Yorker The Road Ahead from John Zimmer (Lyft Co-Founder) Ian Skebba, Margaret He
Wednesday 2/7 No class, spend time reading working on Milestone2
Friday 2/9 [gdoc] Money and cryptocurrencies Read Cryptocurrency Might be a Path to Authoritarianism by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother and A glimpse into the dystopian future of technology-centered parenting Tristan Bala, Zhening Zhang
Monday 2/12 [pdf] BlackMirror1 S1E3 "The Entire History of You" Why We Lie: The Science Behind Our Deceptive Ways Kris Quon, Andy Li
Wednesday 2/14 [pdf] BlackMirror2 S4E2 "Arkangel" Notes Toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto and Why We Lie: The Science Behind Our Deceptive Ways Sven Olson, Aaron Parra
Friday 2/16 [gdoc] BlackMirror3 S4E1 "USS Callister" The Challenge of Determining Whether an A.I. Is Sentient and When Will Robots Deserve Human Rights? Final paper Milestone 2 due Nicholas Ng Hannah Fong
Monday 2/19 No class, President's Day
Wednesday 2/21 [gdoc] Privacy Read Privacy and Information Technology, an article from the Stanford encyclopedia of phylosophy, 2014. ACLU report on DNA database expansion and What the future of surveillance looks like Shrimathi Vetrivelan, David Tran
Friday 2/23 [gdoc] Big data (a) Watch Haunted by Data by Maciej Ceglowski (2015) (20 mins). (b) Watch The era of blind faith in big data must end by Cathy O’Neil (2017) (13 mins). (c) Watch Slaughterbots by Stuart Russell (2017) (8 mins) (fiction). (d) Read The Anxieties of Big Data by Kate Crawford (2014). https://rroyselaw.com/technology-transactions/agtech/legal-issues-big-data-2017/ Jatin Gaba, Joshua Brown
Monday 2/26 [gdoc] Surveillance (a) Read Want to Predict the Future of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communities by Virginia Eubanks (2014). (b) Read Big Other by Shoshana Zuboff (2015) [Warning: difficult reading]. (c) China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants by Nithin Coca (d) Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing Alex Derebenskiy, Andres Sanchez
Wednesday 2/28 [gdoc] Surveillance Read The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (endnotes instead of footnotes) by Phillip Rogaway (2015) Tanya Shelton and William Jackson
Friday 3/2 Aaron Swartz Prepare to discuss the life of Aaron Swartz: Write a summary report (max 1 page). Turn it in via Canvas before lecture.
  • Read Dotorow’s blog
  • Read Lessig’s blog
 Navid A Nadvi, Noa Shadmon
Monday 3/5 Bad company (a) Read What was Volkswagen Thinking? by Justin Renteria (2016). (b) Spend half an hour more to read something you find online about the Volkswagen emissions scandal. (c) Some people do behave reasonably: read The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis by Joe Morgenstern (1995). Cindy Peng
Wednesday 3/7 Bad company Was Facebook unethical for publishing research without the consent of the users? Possible reading/links to support your arguments: Final paper due Cynthia Lai, Kevin Chung
Friday 3/9 No class, prep for presentations
Monday 3/12 Presentations
  • Group 8
  • Group 2
  • Group 11
And in the discussion section:
  • Artificial Unintelligence
  • Group 1
  • Group 3
 None
Wednesday 3/14 Presentations
  • Group 10
  • Group 4
  • Group 9
 None
Friday 3/16 Presentations
  • Ethics Explorers
  • Group 7
  • YAGroup2
 None

Discussion section

For the six open discussion sections, I'll lead one to talk about my industry experience, we'll watch 2-3 movies, and I'll find 2-3 guest lecturers. Possible topics will include ethics in practice, lessons learned from ethics in other fields, and ethical failures of the field.

Date Topic
Monday 1/8None, first day of class
Monday 1/15MLK day, no class
Monday 1/22The Matrix
Monday 1/29The Matrix
Monday 2/5The Matrix
Monday 2/12TBD
Monday 2/19Presedent's day, no class
Monday 2/26We are Legion
Monday 3/5We are Legion
Monday 3/12Presentations