23 ms·

New ethics courses in computer science

126 points by htiek 9y ago

subroutine 9y ago
Whenever I hear about these ethics courses I'm mainly curios about what non-obvious substantive content being taught (because there is apparently enough to fill a semester-long course). Anyone who has taken one of these courses care to share something they learned that, before the course, had never considered?
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  I'm sure there is non-obvious substantive content, but it is more akin to navel gazing than real-world applicable knowledge. https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-their-mothers https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-t... > Ethicists do not behave better. But neither, overall, do they seem to behave worse
- lumberjack 9y ago
  The philosophical aspect of ethics is not void of substance. There are many ways to think about the ethics of a situation. You learn different frameworks of ethical thought and you gain new perspectives. Some people who are very ideological will write this off as useless bullshit, but only because they are very invested in only one perspective and not open minded enough to consider the merits of other ethical frameworks. To give you a programming analogy, it is as if you always programmed imperatively, using C, because you learned that organically as you grew up, and then you take this class and you learn about functional programming and object oriented programming and you learn how you can think of the same problem from a completely different perspective. Except with the crucial difference, that the end result will not necessarily be the same and in fact there is not always a right answer. But when there is not always one right answer it is better to know many possible answers and why they are possible answers, than only one such answer.
- burkaman 9y ago
  My school had a required Computer Ethics course for CS majors. It was a bi-weekly discussion section with readings and a final essay, so not really a full size course. We covered intellectual property, privacy (SOPA was in the news at the time), net neutrality, and free speech/social networks. These are all obvious subjects, but the idea was to get people to read about them and debate them, rather than just have an uninformed opinion and never discuss it.
- matt4077 9y ago
  You can easily fill a semester just discussing the trolley problem. The most important aspect of such classes is invariably to teach that technical decisions have ethical consequences. Just getting people to think about those would be a big win. Too many people still take a "it's the person that kills, not the gun" to their task of building a better gun.
muninn_ 9y ago
Instead of Harvard, Stanford, and MIT attempting to address "the dark side" I'd prefer to see people who aren't graduating and going straight to work at the companies who bring out the worst (and sometimes best) of tech's ethical problems address this problem or at least be heard. Do we really need Goog.. I mean Stanford lecturing us on ethics? I guess it's good that they've at least somewhat seen the problem, even if it's a problem because it harms future revenue streams. Maybe the NYT (which I have a subscription to) is going to tell me next that Clinton has a 100% chance to win the 2020 election?
ProAm 9y ago
Such a good opening line, "The medical profession has an ethic: First, do no harm. Silicon Valley has an ethos: Build it first and ask for forgiveness later."
- Spooky23 9y ago
  It’s the downside of the VC model where the investors are insulated from the activity and are just throwing money against the wall and seein what sticks. Ethical behavior is a cousin of accountability. Tech is about failing fast. When the management and investors in a firm have little accountability in the future of the individual enterprise, why would you expect them to make correct decisions vs expedient ones?
- Alex3917 9y ago
  Yeah but both of those are just marketing postures that don’t really have anything to do with the underlying realities of their respective industries.
  - ProAm 9y ago
    I think it speaks well to start ups, VC culture and silicon valley as a whole actually. It is a bit posture-y but feel its accurate.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    It's necessary to establish a policy before you can enforce it. You can't argue about exceptions if you don't fundamentally support the legitimacy of the policy, either. "First, do no harm" is a policy statement. Once you accept it, you can make arguments about tradeoffs (pain management, amputation, chemotherapy, abortion), but without having a policy statement, there's no argument being made, just a free-for-all mess.
    - Alex3917 9y ago
      > without having a policy statement, there's no argument being made, just a free-for-all mess. Given that medical treatments are the second or third leading cause of death in the U.S., how much good is the policy statement really doing?
purple-again 9y ago
Always a losers game. You implement it with ethics in mind, I do not. I win and you fall into obscurity. The law is all that matters. If I can not lose what I take, there is no reason for me not to take it (so long as I'm still chasing the 'fuck you money', morals are great after you have it). I understand it, lots of people have dreamed big dreams of how great the world would be if everyone else was just like them too.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Except the article mentions that they're targeting >the next generation of technologists and policymakers Sure tech workers in a bad system are coerced into unethical actions, but policymakers hold the power to alter the system itself so that they're not.
  - hobofan 9y ago
    > policymakers hold the power The cynic in me tells me that the winning unethical companies hold the power over the policymakers.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- miketery 9y ago
  > The law is all that matters Agreed. Lets change it.
  - jackhack 9y ago
    Unless you are sitting on a mountain of money, forget it. You must buy laws of any substance. Laws represent power structures. Power structures are buttressed with money flows. If you threaten either, it will not end well. Politicans know this. They profit from it, it is the product being sold. (Ever wonder how so many congressmen end their terms as millionaires?)
- moomin 9y ago
  If the law is the only thing that matters, then it follows that more regulation will come. Maybe try self-regulating before putting more power in the hands of the government?
bpicolo 9y ago
Some recent TechnoScifi has done a really interesting job getting this sort of stuff into the general public. Black Mirror, Altered Carbon are both terrific and dive into tech ethics to different extents, and the outreach there is many millions of viewers. That's sort of an interesting potential take on this - how do you take ethical questions and get drastically wider outreach for them (vs a static class). Revisionist history has a recent podcast along how satire sort of lives in an interesting realm here (and how modern, western satire seems to miss the mark). http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  > Black Mirror, Altered Carbon are both terrific and dive into tech ethics to different extents, and the outreach there is many millions of viewers. Also Electric Dreams.
nemild 9y ago
If useful, I wrote my own thoughts on ethics in software, after reflecting on certain experiences over the years: > A serial tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley once asked me to design a “social stockade” for his financial services customers. It would lock people out of their social media accounts and tweet out/FB share to their friends when they hadn’t paid a loan. He pitched it to prospective employees as meaningful work that would reduce the cost of loans for the needy. > I was horrified that his product was being built and that many others would likely take the role I was turning down. And he was hardly the first to pitch his “innovation” as providing only good. https://www.nemil.com/musings/software-engineers-and-ethics.html https://www.nemil.com/musings/software-engineers-and-ethics.... If anyone ever wants to discuss something, feel free to reach out (see HN profile).
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Interestingly, many microfinance programs that are widely heralded as having lifted many people out of poverty (eg. Grameen Bank, CARE) rely heavily on peer pressure to boost their repayment rates. They lend out to groups within a village, and then if any one member of the group fails to repay the loan, the group can't access more capital. This creates a strong incentive for other members of the group to exert social pressure to make sure everyone pays back their loan. ...which goes to illustrate the complexity of most ethical issues that arise out of social systems. Oftentimes, something that seems cruel to an individual within the system is actually in the best interests of the participants of the system as a whole, and sometimes can even be in the long-term best interest of the person themselves. And then whether you view such features as cruel & unethical or necessary & beneficial depends on your perspective & role within the system. (This could also be taken as a synecdoche for capitalism itself, which on a micro level is about as cruel as you can get - individuals compete in a race to the bottom to do things more cheaply, and nobody will help you unless it serves their interests too - but on a macro level is the most effective system we know of for satisfying consumer wants.)
  - jclos 9y ago
    > They lend out to groups within a village, and then if any one member of the group fails to repay the loan, the group can't access more capital. That reminds me of those loan systems where you need to send naked pictures of yourself as a collateral, and that seemed to become popular in China (at least according to Western media). https://qz.com/707770/chinas-college-students-are-using-nude-photos-as-online-loan-collateral/ https://qz.com/707770/chinas-college-students-are-using-nude...
rafiki6 9y ago
Technologists aren't doctors. Doctors are a necessity because people have an incessant need to stay alive. Technologists aren't a fundamental necessity to society. We are business people. The only rules/ethics that govern us are business rules/ethics. Some might argue, "but technology is required for us to survive". It's not. We've survived plenty without it. Technology is required for us to thrive.
- Apocryphon 9y ago
  To be specific, we've survived without monetized, big money-driven technology.
- purple-again 9y ago
  Well said. Those of us who came from a business background remember our business ethics in university well. The running joke, from start to finish, is a thank you for compiling together the things we should walk carefully and carry a big stick while doing.
  - grasshopperpurp 9y ago
    >The running joke, from start to finish, is a thank you for compiling together the things we should walk carefully and carry a big stick while doing. These are the types we should weed out of society.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Technologists aren't doctors. Doctors are a subset of technologists. > Doctors are a necessity because people have an incessant need to stay alive. Medical care is an application of technology people are particularly willing to sacrifice other things to pay for, but not without limit. That's not the only application of technology for which they is true. > Technologists aren't a fundamental necessity to society. Hard to say that's any more true than of Doctors; you can have a society without doctors or without other technologists, but if you do, people will very quickly start assuming those roles. > We are business people. Most technologists are not business people. A few are, but that's incidental, not fundamental. > The only rules/ethics that govern us are business rules/ethics. At least in formal terms, this is true of information technology, but it has nothing to do with necessity or lack thereof (it's not true of lawyers, who are certainly not necessary to survival.) It's just that IT (unlike medicine, law, or proper engineering) lacks professionalization.
spodek 9y ago
I like their goals, but the traditional academic implementation described in the article and in the syllabus the article linked to won't achieve them. If you want people to learn behavior, you can't lecture them into it, nor will talking about case studies or writing papers help. Look at the behavior those classes teach: analysis, reading, writing, debating other people's behavior. Active, experiential, project-based, exercise-based learning will do the trick. Many professors think "flipping the classroom" or having more class discussions is active or experiential, but it rarely is. You have to get students acting on their values, feeling their own values conflicting with each other on projects they care about involving people in their lives that they care about, having others depend on their actions, having to perform on something they created, not spelled out for them in a case study. Then they learn empathy, compassion, responsibility, initiative, self-awareness, and ways to act in challenging situations. If you want to be an artist, you have to practice making art. Art appreciation classes won't hurt, but they won't help, any more than reading about or discussing lifting weights will build muscle. The classes they describe are ethics appreciation or leadership appreciation. Well-intentioned, but limited.
- ebenrock 9y ago
  This is very much like the gender imbalance in tech - starting to address it in college only provides a band-aid. This is a much deeper issue that starts soon after birth. As a CMU grad student they had the Reasonable Person Principle to help guide your actions and interactions. The principle states nothing about ethics, but generally that you should be open to others' concerns, practice self-reflection, and even accept that their viewpoints differ from yours. In spite of this principle being in place I definitely dealt with at least one very unreasonable person during my graduate studies there. I've been in several ethical conundrums in my career. In a couple cases my choice was the "lesser" unethical option among many. It can be difficult to make those choices when your career or employment is on the line. I've left jobs because I believed (or knew) the work I was doing wasn't quite on the level. Trying to recreate these scenarios, realistically, in a class room is pretty hard. Having discussions about ethics is nice, but probably not very effective. Could you build a course, or assignment, where the only way to get an A is to cheat or act unethically? Would that even be ethical for the university to offer? In my cynicism, this looks like a "cover-our-asses" maneuver by universities, at least in part.
ytyutufhg 9y ago
You cannot change human nature. You can only save yourself. Is that cynical? I wonder...
seabird 9y ago
All of these noble ideas of ethics and social responsibility are great for everyone that feels bound by them themselves. Many of the rest can't be bothered. People who have to be taught that the missile they're building is going to kill people and that they should feel bad about it probably already knows that the missile they're building is going to kill people and they don't feel bad about it. You see this issue come to a head in computer technology because much of it doesn't have absurd cost/precision requirements like weapons, drugs/pharmaceuticals, etc. have.
- taurath 9y ago
  I think people come up with all sorts of justifications for why what they’re doing isn’t wrong. Concerted effort to knock down those justifications and socially shame those that cling to them does work - consider all the people who don’t want to go work for an ad company or a defense contractor, or those who leave with one of the reasons being to escape the industry that they know is wrong.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    I think the opposite - people come up with all sorts of justifications for why what other people are doing is wrong. This lets them feel self satisfied, virtuous and perhaps a little smug effectively for free, and if their position is perhaps a little thinly thought out, well, no big deal, it's not like anyone is going to listen anyway. I've watched many attempts to tar entire industries as evil over the years. Invariably the people doing the tarring look foolish or naive - like they can't think more than one step ahead, or like they live in a world where tradeoffs do not exist. To pick just the two examples you chose: without defense industries countries would be ripe for being taken over by even a slightly aggressive invader who would immediately commit all sorts of horrible atrocities. That's why defense exists. Given that countries have been invading each other for thousands of years, it's a massive stretch to believe we are in a post-war society and people who attack defense workers invariably never try to argue that. They don't seem able or willing to think the next step ahead: "ok, everyone refuses to build weapons.... then what?" And as for ads, if you remove all ads from the internet, TV, cinemas etc then all those things would suddenly become way more expensive. Good luck affording an internet connection if your daily browsing habit isn't being subsidised by advertisers anymore. That would be a fast way to ensure nobody poor could use the internet. Do you hate the poor? Probably not: more likely you never thought about the consequences of not having advertising.
drdeadringer 9y ago
Someone recently suggested the podcast "Engineering Commons", and I'm currently playing catch-up. They had an episode about "Ethics", in which they discuss the topic with their guest.
whatok 9y ago
So the same places where all of these companies got their groupthink from is supposed to fix the problem?
lev99 9y ago
Ethics is already required for ABET accreditation. Almost every good United States based university level Computer Science program is ABET accredited. I took an entire two credit long course on ethics to receive my degree, involving writing at least four essays. One of the essays discussed the ethical considerations for writing code utilized by the military. The idea that computer programmers can do evil is not new. While some universities are creating new computer ethics courses, creating new computer ethic courses is not new. How is this national news worthy? NYTimes has been increasingly disappointing.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  In the absence of regulatory bodies, professional sanction and the like, its worth even less than most accreditations in the tech world.
  - aoki 9y ago
    ABET accreditation is for degree programs, not individuals. it sets curricular standards. most credible engineering programs maintain ABET accreditation, as it has been required for graduates to become PEs [0]. [0] i recently heard that berkeley EECS is dropping its ABET accreditation, as this is no longer true: https://eecs.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/abet_letter_to_everyone_rev7.pdf https://eecs.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/abet_letter_to...
deckarep 9y ago
Also watch Black Mirror on Netflix. Beyond the satire, dark humor and guilty entertainment this show offers quite a lot to consider on this exact subject matter.
- pdkl95 9y ago
  I very highly recommend this[1] outstanding analysis of Black Mirror. It's short, it explores how Black Mirror fits in the history of sci-fi, and is one of the most concise explanations of the root cause of this kind of "tech problem" (hint: it isn't actually caused by technology; it's how people use it. Technology is just an amplifier). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr9_DcO6G3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr9_DcO6G3A
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
"I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." -Beyond Vietnam (1967), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksile... It seems futile to silo this as a problem of "tech", when really it's a problem of society at large: that profit motives are largely considered more important than people.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > It seems futile to silo this as a problem of "tech", when really it's a problem of society at large Of course, but while it is broadly socially acceptable to criticize a particular industry or technology, criticizing capitalism is less acceptable; indeed, redirecting frustration at particular (and changing periodically) industries and away from the system itself is a key defense mechanism.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I grew tired of arguments supporting fleecing the users that were basically "We aren't making them do this, they choose to do it." I have heard them put forward at nearly every company I've worked at, at various levels and through various departments. At Google it was always "We don't take an editorial stand, this might be just what some of our customers want." That has been the most interesting aspect of their recent moves to either sanction advertisers or block them. So somewhere in there it has gone from "If people don't want to see ads there are lots of adblockers out there to choose from." to "We need to take a stand against abusive advertisers." And that is a huge difference in approach. Do engineers need a Hippocratic oath? I'm not sure they do, but if we forced some liability on companies for what the software they sell does, that would change a lot of things fairly quickly.
- artificial 9y ago
  >if we forced some liability on companies for what the software they sell does, that would change a lot of things fairly quickly. Absolutely that would change things, especially the cost of software.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    I'm so tired of people saying stuff like this as if I should care. Go ahead, raise prices. If your product is solving a real problem, people will pay for it. If not, well, we didn't need you anyway. This is, incidentally, how capitalism is supposed to work. If your business model doesn't work without you doing bad things, then it shouldn't work. You don't have a god-given right to make money and if you can't make money doing prosocial things, you don't deserve to make money. Free software has been doing the right thing for decades. The internet of the 90s before everything was carefully tracked and to addict and display ads was better. There are lots of incentives besides money out there and if money is the only one you care about, I'm not on your side.
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      Usually the unethical things are designed to corner customers into spending more: DRM, proprietary game server hosting, etc. The problem we have with capitalism now is that it is abused by large corporations who fight for their right to monopolize and abuse customers. What everyone else has lost is the right to compete without abusing customers.
QML 9y ago
Honestly, there should just be a required ethics component to all college curriculums; I am not sure why it needs to be technologically focused. I would actually say the tech industry is the least of our worries with concerns to ethics; the last two years, tech has been heavily criticized and as a result it seems that people in the field are willing to change. Can't say the same about any other industry.
- spydum 9y ago
  Is this not common? Even at junior collgss ethics is typically a first year requirement
lostcolony 9y ago
That's one thing that, in hindsight, I quite liked about undergrad CS at Georgia Tech. CS4001, Computer Ethics, was required. It didn't try to push a specific worldview, but rather asked people to consider the ramifications of technical (and business) decisions, to discuss them, and to recognize the stakeholders beyond just the company paying. At the time I went through it, DRM was a big topic, and big data concerns were beginning to be (especially as noted that the problem was more than just what you stored, it was what -everyone- stored, and the ability to correlate it; you had to consider what else was out there). I imagine the latter now dwarfs the former.
foxrider 9y ago
I think it's a dubious waste of time, because forcing people to take ethics classes wouldn't meant that they are going to stick to the proposed ethics. I've took ethics class in my Uni back in the day because I was curious what it was about and it also was a fairly easy one to pass. The prof was nice and informative, but her conclusions were something I would disagree with all the time, and I left the course only with knowledge of some historical stuff, but none of my views on what's ethical and what's not had not been changed. If anything I only got to solidify my position based on facts provided by her. Unless people would adopt these ethics willfully there is no forcing them to.
fortythirteen 9y ago
I tend to tune out every time a journalist cites the main problem with "the dark side of tech" as "fake news". Firstly, it's devolved into a term to play upon the confirmation bias of people who think those who hold a different opinion than them did not arrive there out of differing life experience, but because they must be either stupid or evil. Secondly, there are many dark sides of tech that are of greater importance than what is usually a subjective assessment that news is fake; such as unfettered personal data mining, engineered addictiveness, cooperation with oppressive governments, and growing soft-censorship of users whose politics differ from that of major platforms' operators.
ilamont 9y ago
I attended the ARinAction summit earlier this month, and heard an interesting tidbit from the MIT Media Lab's Pattie Maes: She requires new students joining her program to watch Black Mirror (1). In contrast, when I attended business school one of the models held up to us in the very first week was the team at Harrah's who designed a loyalty program for frequent gamblers (2). I remember one of the professors or someone in a video interview we watched crowing, "it was like printing money." Neither the case nor the instructor had anything to say about the fact that this was basically a technology-driven scheme to extract as much money as possible from members of the public, including gambling addicts and other vulnerable populations. The "big question" at the conclusion of the case reads: When asked about the company’s long-term vision for its RM system, a member of Harrah’s RM team became thoughtful for a moment. He responded that, while all of the near and longer-term developments described above were critical, he thought there was one important aspect of all RM systems that needed further development. "What I’d really like to know — and I pose this as a question for researchers in revenue management — is how to integrate information about price elasticity into these systems. Clearly, changes in price affect the level of demand we experience. However, none of the systems we are familiar with capture this effect." 1. https://theoutline.com/post/3167/black-mirror-mit-class?zd=4&zi=rgwp4nu7 https://theoutline.com/post/3167/black-mirror-mit-class?zd=4... 2. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/ited.1090.0031cs https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/ited.1090.003...
oakgrove1 9y ago
Universities need more fluff courses so they can pump out more people with scam degrees. It fulfills the goals of creating more busywork trash courses and also pushes mind-control propaganda.
workthrowaway27 9y ago
I doubt these ethics courses do anything to change people's behavior.
jakelarkin 9y ago
great, but how about also focusing on the MBAs and non-tech background managers/execs that fill out the 5-10 levels of hierarchy above line engineers at any BigTechCo. Not like bottom-of-the-rung SWEs necessarily have visibility or control of the company selling some ads to customers using them for dis-information campaigns. Or how about teaching fact-checking & propaganda skepticism to ALL citizens. too often the problems currently ascribed to "tech" are problems of society as whole.
zombieprocesses 9y ago
We already have ethics in the philosophy department. I'm was CS major and I took ethics and liked it so much I double majored in CS and philosophy. Ethics has no place in CS, nor more than ethics is required in biology or physics or algebra. If universities want students to learn about ethics, then make ethics 101 a "required elective".
- matt4077 9y ago
  Many natural science programs actually have classes in ethics, sometimes mandatory, sometimes as an elective. The Technical University here in Berlin, Germany, has one of the most respected departments of philosophy in the country. The reason: After WW2, the British mandated that "hard" sciences should never again be taught without ethics.
- MereInterest 9y ago
  Your comparisons are rather odd, given that most universities do have ethics requirements for the sciences, focused on examples from the field in question. Biology: Do not repeat the Tuskegee experiements. Do not be the next Andrew Wakefield. Physics: Do not falsify data. Do not plagiarize results. Do not play fast and loose with statistics. I can definitely see corresponding examples being made for issues that affect CS. CS: Do not collect customer information that is not needed for the task at hand. Do not describe your machine-learning model as being free of bias based on race/sex, if you was trained with real-world data that may be biased.
  - Rylinks 9y ago
    Chemical engineering: If you don't know what you're doing, your reactor will blow up and kill people. Here are some cases where people didn't know what they were doing. Don't be like them.
  - Zak 9y ago
    The examples from other fields offered here relate purely to the academic field, while one of your CS examples is very much related to software as a business. Biology as a business: don't try to patent the world's food supply. Physics as a business: consider whether your client is building a weapon out of your work and whom they might use it against.
pascalxus 9y ago
I've been a software engineer for over 12 years and have never had to make a single ethical decision. It's always, here's the spec: build it.
- lovich 9y ago
  Whether or not you choose to follow orders _is_ an ethical decision.
  - pascalxus 9y ago
    The laws align pretty well with Ethics. Most things that are unethical are also illegal and hence won't be built by any legitimate company. How often do you think a company chooses to build something that's unethical but legal? Have you ever heard of a engineer who said to the PM or boss, "hey, i'm not going to build that because it's unethical". I've never seen that happen. have you?
    - lovich 9y ago
      Any payday loan company? The financial service companies that figured out how to obfuscate shitty assets and led to the 2008 recession? Companies that mine your data and sell it to the highest bidder and rely on hiding privacy settings or making it too complicated for most people to prevent? Companies like Equifax that hold on to important personal data and don't even do the bare minimum to protect it? To be honest I'm not sure how to even respond to the statement that the law aligns with pretty well with ethics. The law aligns pretty well with what the people with power want and in any study of ethics you quickly learn that legal != ethical
mikegerwitz 9y ago
I'm giving a talk in March at LibrePlanet 2018 entited "The Ethics Void". The lack of ethics in CS education is a core component of the talk. I'm neck-deep in my talk research right now, so if you are a, student, educator, or anyone else with thoughts on ethics in CS, I'd love to hear from you: https://mikegerwitz.com/talks https://mikegerwitz.com/talks Unfortunately, the codes of ethics, courses, etc that do exist largely ignore user freedoms (in a software freedom sense) and the host of ethical concerns that come with it. If you have examples that _do_ address those issues, I'd really appreciate hearing about it. And please join us at LP2018 (hosted at MIT)!
thomastjeffery 9y ago
In an IT-related class I had in High School, part of the course was a lesson in ethics. Part of the "lesson" taught that if you have a good/unique idea, you should patent it, lest someone else get the value from it before you do, and that you should keep your software closed-source lest someone pirate it. There was no voice for free software or against the absurdity of software patents outside my own vocal retorts. This was part of a district-wide course, and probably contained popular ideas used by many other districts. Another thing I see in schools/colleges is that Microsoft will give free licenses to the school and students for their software so long as it is used and taught. Free software takes a backseat, and people are taught to use - and prefer - Microsoft's proprietary tools. Microsoft gets to control their target audience, and be seen as doing something generous, not abusive.
tonetheman 9y ago
It is interesting but this is in direct opposition to "make money fast and do whatever you need to do." When shareholders come first there is no way ethics will ever be involved.
ssebastianj 9y ago
Don't forget "Dark Patterns" [0] [0] https://darkpatterns.org https://darkpatterns.org
bobthechef 9y ago
I sincerely hope that consequentialist ethics won't dominate those courses.
woodruffw 9y ago
I'm teaching a 1-credit class on ethical hacking[1] this semester at my university, and I'm really glad to see this issue gain serious traction in major CS departments. I only wish it happened earlier -- I wanted to help develop a (more general) CS ethics class around a year ago[2][3], but encountered resistance from instructors and professors over perceived impracticality and adding non-technical "burden" to the major. [1]: https://github.com/UMD-CS-STICs/389Rspring18 https://github.com/UMD-CS-STICs/389Rspring18 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14680425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14680425 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14106201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14106201
- aoki 9y ago
  kudos. ABET-accredited engineering programs have had to document instruction in design ethics for a long time. anybody designing a good CS curriculum should know that and be thinking about whether CS really ought to be different in that regard. berkeley has offered CS 195 [0] for more than three decades. [0] http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs195/ http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs195/
samzeisler 9y ago
This is incredibly long overdue and so important. My partners and I had designs on creating an ethical framework for technologists years ago but didn’t feel we had the platform or the reach to spread it. That’s no excuse for sitting Idly by and doing nothing but nonetheless, we are thrilled to see this now coming into play. I hope that the professors and professionals who are contemplating this will come together and form an alliance to create a national standard policy and statement around this.

126 points by htiek 9y ago

Whenever I hear about these ethics courses I'm mainly curios about what non-obvious substantive content being taught (because there is apparently enough to fill a semester-long course). Anyone who has taken one of these courses care to share something they learned that, before the course, had never considered?

oh_sigh 9y ago
I'm sure there is non-obvious substantive content, but it is more akin to navel gazing than real-world applicable knowledge. https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-their-mothers https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-t... > Ethicists do not behave better. But neither, overall, do they seem to behave worse
lumberjack 9y ago
The philosophical aspect of ethics is not void of substance. There are many ways to think about the ethics of a situation. You learn different frameworks of ethical thought and you gain new perspectives. Some people who are very ideological will write this off as useless bullshit, but only because they are very invested in only one perspective and not open minded enough to consider the merits of other ethical frameworks. To give you a programming analogy, it is as if you always programmed imperatively, using C, because you learned that organically as you grew up, and then you take this class and you learn about functional programming and object oriented programming and you learn how you can think of the same problem from a completely different perspective. Except with the crucial difference, that the end result will not necessarily be the same and in fact there is not always a right answer. But when there is not always one right answer it is better to know many possible answers and why they are possible answers, than only one such answer.
burkaman 9y ago
My school had a required Computer Ethics course for CS majors. It was a bi-weekly discussion section with readings and a final essay, so not really a full size course. We covered intellectual property, privacy (SOPA was in the news at the time), net neutrality, and free speech/social networks. These are all obvious subjects, but the idea was to get people to read about them and debate them, rather than just have an uninformed opinion and never discuss it.
matt4077 9y ago
You can easily fill a semester just discussing the trolley problem. The most important aspect of such classes is invariably to teach that technical decisions have ethical consequences. Just getting people to think about those would be a big win. Too many people still take a "it's the person that kills, not the gun" to their task of building a better gun.

muninn_ 9y ago

Instead of Harvard, Stanford, and MIT attempting to address "the dark side" I'd prefer to see people who aren't graduating and going straight to work at the companies who bring out the worst (and sometimes best) of tech's ethical problems address this problem or at least be heard. Do we really need Goog.. I mean Stanford lecturing us on ethics? I guess it's good that they've at least somewhat seen the problem, even if it's a problem because it harms future revenue streams. Maybe the NYT (which I have a subscription to) is going to tell me next that Clinton has a 100% chance to win the 2020 election?

ProAm 9y ago

Such a good opening line, "The medical profession has an ethic: First, do no harm. Silicon Valley has an ethos: Build it first and ask for forgiveness later."

Spooky23 9y ago
It’s the downside of the VC model where the investors are insulated from the activity and are just throwing money against the wall and seein what sticks. Ethical behavior is a cousin of accountability. Tech is about failing fast. When the management and investors in a firm have little accountability in the future of the individual enterprise, why would you expect them to make correct decisions vs expedient ones?
Alex3917 9y ago
Yeah but both of those are just marketing postures that don’t really have anything to do with the underlying realities of their respective industries.
- ProAm 9y ago
  I think it speaks well to start ups, VC culture and silicon valley as a whole actually. It is a bit posture-y but feel its accurate.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  It's necessary to establish a policy before you can enforce it. You can't argue about exceptions if you don't fundamentally support the legitimacy of the policy, either. "First, do no harm" is a policy statement. Once you accept it, you can make arguments about tradeoffs (pain management, amputation, chemotherapy, abortion), but without having a policy statement, there's no argument being made, just a free-for-all mess.
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    > without having a policy statement, there's no argument being made, just a free-for-all mess. Given that medical treatments are the second or third leading cause of death in the U.S., how much good is the policy statement really doing?

purple-again 9y ago

Always a losers game. You implement it with ethics in mind, I do not. I win and you fall into obscurity. The law is all that matters. If I can not lose what I take, there is no reason for me not to take it (so long as I'm still chasing the 'fuck you money', morals are great after you have it). I understand it, lots of people have dreamed big dreams of how great the world would be if everyone else was just like them too.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Except the article mentions that they're targeting >the next generation of technologists and policymakers Sure tech workers in a bad system are coerced into unethical actions, but policymakers hold the power to alter the system itself so that they're not.
- hobofan 9y ago
  > policymakers hold the power The cynic in me tells me that the winning unethical companies hold the power over the policymakers.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
miketery 9y ago
> The law is all that matters Agreed. Lets change it.
- jackhack 9y ago
  Unless you are sitting on a mountain of money, forget it. You must buy laws of any substance. Laws represent power structures. Power structures are buttressed with money flows. If you threaten either, it will not end well. Politicans know this. They profit from it, it is the product being sold. (Ever wonder how so many congressmen end their terms as millionaires?)
moomin 9y ago
If the law is the only thing that matters, then it follows that more regulation will come. Maybe try self-regulating before putting more power in the hands of the government?

bpicolo 9y ago

Some recent TechnoScifi has done a really interesting job getting this sort of stuff into the general public. Black Mirror, Altered Carbon are both terrific and dive into tech ethics to different extents, and the outreach there is many millions of viewers. That's sort of an interesting potential take on this - how do you take ethical questions and get drastically wider outreach for them (vs a static class). Revisionist history has a recent podcast along how satire sort of lives in an interesting realm here (and how modern, western satire seems to miss the mark). http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox

kerkeslager 9y ago
> Black Mirror, Altered Carbon are both terrific and dive into tech ethics to different extents, and the outreach there is many millions of viewers. Also Electric Dreams.

nemild 9y ago

If useful, I wrote my own thoughts on ethics in software, after reflecting on certain experiences over the years: > A serial tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley once asked me to design a “social stockade” for his financial services customers. It would lock people out of their social media accounts and tweet out/FB share to their friends when they hadn’t paid a loan. He pitched it to prospective employees as meaningful work that would reduce the cost of loans for the needy. > I was horrified that his product was being built and that many others would likely take the role I was turning down. And he was hardly the first to pitch his “innovation” as providing only good. https://www.nemil.com/musings/software-engineers-and-ethics.html https://www.nemil.com/musings/software-engineers-and-ethics.... If anyone ever wants to discuss something, feel free to reach out (see HN profile).

nostrademons 9y ago
Interestingly, many microfinance programs that are widely heralded as having lifted many people out of poverty (eg. Grameen Bank, CARE) rely heavily on peer pressure to boost their repayment rates. They lend out to groups within a village, and then if any one member of the group fails to repay the loan, the group can't access more capital. This creates a strong incentive for other members of the group to exert social pressure to make sure everyone pays back their loan. ...which goes to illustrate the complexity of most ethical issues that arise out of social systems. Oftentimes, something that seems cruel to an individual within the system is actually in the best interests of the participants of the system as a whole, and sometimes can even be in the long-term best interest of the person themselves. And then whether you view such features as cruel & unethical or necessary & beneficial depends on your perspective & role within the system. (This could also be taken as a synecdoche for capitalism itself, which on a micro level is about as cruel as you can get - individuals compete in a race to the bottom to do things more cheaply, and nobody will help you unless it serves their interests too - but on a macro level is the most effective system we know of for satisfying consumer wants.)
- jclos 9y ago
  > They lend out to groups within a village, and then if any one member of the group fails to repay the loan, the group can't access more capital. That reminds me of those loan systems where you need to send naked pictures of yourself as a collateral, and that seemed to become popular in China (at least according to Western media). https://qz.com/707770/chinas-college-students-are-using-nude-photos-as-online-loan-collateral/ https://qz.com/707770/chinas-college-students-are-using-nude...

rafiki6 9y ago

Technologists aren't doctors. Doctors are a necessity because people have an incessant need to stay alive. Technologists aren't a fundamental necessity to society. We are business people. The only rules/ethics that govern us are business rules/ethics. Some might argue, "but technology is required for us to survive". It's not. We've survived plenty without it. Technology is required for us to thrive.

Apocryphon 9y ago
To be specific, we've survived without monetized, big money-driven technology.
purple-again 9y ago
Well said. Those of us who came from a business background remember our business ethics in university well. The running joke, from start to finish, is a thank you for compiling together the things we should walk carefully and carry a big stick while doing.
- grasshopperpurp 9y ago
  >The running joke, from start to finish, is a thank you for compiling together the things we should walk carefully and carry a big stick while doing. These are the types we should weed out of society.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Technologists aren't doctors. Doctors are a subset of technologists. > Doctors are a necessity because people have an incessant need to stay alive. Medical care is an application of technology people are particularly willing to sacrifice other things to pay for, but not without limit. That's not the only application of technology for which they is true. > Technologists aren't a fundamental necessity to society. Hard to say that's any more true than of Doctors; you can have a society without doctors or without other technologists, but if you do, people will very quickly start assuming those roles. > We are business people. Most technologists are not business people. A few are, but that's incidental, not fundamental. > The only rules/ethics that govern us are business rules/ethics. At least in formal terms, this is true of information technology, but it has nothing to do with necessity or lack thereof (it's not true of lawyers, who are certainly not necessary to survival.) It's just that IT (unlike medicine, law, or proper engineering) lacks professionalization.

spodek 9y ago

I like their goals, but the traditional academic implementation described in the article and in the syllabus the article linked to won't achieve them. If you want people to learn behavior, you can't lecture them into it, nor will talking about case studies or writing papers help. Look at the behavior those classes teach: analysis, reading, writing, debating other people's behavior. Active, experiential, project-based, exercise-based learning will do the trick. Many professors think "flipping the classroom" or having more class discussions is active or experiential, but it rarely is. You have to get students acting on their values, feeling their own values conflicting with each other on projects they care about involving people in their lives that they care about, having others depend on their actions, having to perform on something they created, not spelled out for them in a case study. Then they learn empathy, compassion, responsibility, initiative, self-awareness, and ways to act in challenging situations. If you want to be an artist, you have to practice making art. Art appreciation classes won't hurt, but they won't help, any more than reading about or discussing lifting weights will build muscle. The classes they describe are ethics appreciation or leadership appreciation. Well-intentioned, but limited.

ebenrock 9y ago
This is very much like the gender imbalance in tech - starting to address it in college only provides a band-aid. This is a much deeper issue that starts soon after birth. As a CMU grad student they had the Reasonable Person Principle to help guide your actions and interactions. The principle states nothing about ethics, but generally that you should be open to others' concerns, practice self-reflection, and even accept that their viewpoints differ from yours. In spite of this principle being in place I definitely dealt with at least one very unreasonable person during my graduate studies there. I've been in several ethical conundrums in my career. In a couple cases my choice was the "lesser" unethical option among many. It can be difficult to make those choices when your career or employment is on the line. I've left jobs because I believed (or knew) the work I was doing wasn't quite on the level. Trying to recreate these scenarios, realistically, in a class room is pretty hard. Having discussions about ethics is nice, but probably not very effective. Could you build a course, or assignment, where the only way to get an A is to cheat or act unethically? Would that even be ethical for the university to offer? In my cynicism, this looks like a "cover-our-asses" maneuver by universities, at least in part.

ytyutufhg 9y ago

You cannot change human nature. You can only save yourself. Is that cynical? I wonder...

seabird 9y ago

All of these noble ideas of ethics and social responsibility are great for everyone that feels bound by them themselves. Many of the rest can't be bothered. People who have to be taught that the missile they're building is going to kill people and that they should feel bad about it probably already knows that the missile they're building is going to kill people and they don't feel bad about it. You see this issue come to a head in computer technology because much of it doesn't have absurd cost/precision requirements like weapons, drugs/pharmaceuticals, etc. have.

taurath 9y ago
I think people come up with all sorts of justifications for why what they’re doing isn’t wrong. Concerted effort to knock down those justifications and socially shame those that cling to them does work - consider all the people who don’t want to go work for an ad company or a defense contractor, or those who leave with one of the reasons being to escape the industry that they know is wrong.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  I think the opposite - people come up with all sorts of justifications for why what other people are doing is wrong. This lets them feel self satisfied, virtuous and perhaps a little smug effectively for free, and if their position is perhaps a little thinly thought out, well, no big deal, it's not like anyone is going to listen anyway. I've watched many attempts to tar entire industries as evil over the years. Invariably the people doing the tarring look foolish or naive - like they can't think more than one step ahead, or like they live in a world where tradeoffs do not exist. To pick just the two examples you chose: without defense industries countries would be ripe for being taken over by even a slightly aggressive invader who would immediately commit all sorts of horrible atrocities. That's why defense exists. Given that countries have been invading each other for thousands of years, it's a massive stretch to believe we are in a post-war society and people who attack defense workers invariably never try to argue that. They don't seem able or willing to think the next step ahead: "ok, everyone refuses to build weapons.... then what?" And as for ads, if you remove all ads from the internet, TV, cinemas etc then all those things would suddenly become way more expensive. Good luck affording an internet connection if your daily browsing habit isn't being subsidised by advertisers anymore. That would be a fast way to ensure nobody poor could use the internet. Do you hate the poor? Probably not: more likely you never thought about the consequences of not having advertising.

drdeadringer 9y ago

Someone recently suggested the podcast "Engineering Commons", and I'm currently playing catch-up. They had an episode about "Ethics", in which they discuss the topic with their guest.

whatok 9y ago

So the same places where all of these companies got their groupthink from is supposed to fix the problem?

lev99 9y ago

Ethics is already required for ABET accreditation. Almost every good United States based university level Computer Science program is ABET accredited. I took an entire two credit long course on ethics to receive my degree, involving writing at least four essays. One of the essays discussed the ethical considerations for writing code utilized by the military. The idea that computer programmers can do evil is not new. While some universities are creating new computer ethics courses, creating new computer ethic courses is not new. How is this national news worthy? NYTimes has been increasingly disappointing.

IntronExon 9y ago
In the absence of regulatory bodies, professional sanction and the like, its worth even less than most accreditations in the tech world.
- aoki 9y ago
  ABET accreditation is for degree programs, not individuals. it sets curricular standards. most credible engineering programs maintain ABET accreditation, as it has been required for graduates to become PEs [0]. [0] i recently heard that berkeley EECS is dropping its ABET accreditation, as this is no longer true: https://eecs.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/abet_letter_to_everyone_rev7.pdf https://eecs.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/abet_letter_to...

deckarep 9y ago

Also watch Black Mirror on Netflix. Beyond the satire, dark humor and guilty entertainment this show offers quite a lot to consider on this exact subject matter.

pdkl95 9y ago
I very highly recommend this[1] outstanding analysis of Black Mirror. It's short, it explores how Black Mirror fits in the history of sci-fi, and is one of the most concise explanations of the root cause of this kind of "tech problem" (hint: it isn't actually caused by technology; it's how people use it. Technology is just an amplifier). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr9_DcO6G3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr9_DcO6G3A

wu-ikkyu 9y ago

"I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." -Beyond Vietnam (1967), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksile... It seems futile to silo this as a problem of "tech", when really it's a problem of society at large: that profit motives are largely considered more important than people.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> It seems futile to silo this as a problem of "tech", when really it's a problem of society at large Of course, but while it is broadly socially acceptable to criticize a particular industry or technology, criticizing capitalism is less acceptable; indeed, redirecting frustration at particular (and changing periodically) industries and away from the system itself is a key defense mechanism.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I grew tired of arguments supporting fleecing the users that were basically "We aren't making them do this, they choose to do it." I have heard them put forward at nearly every company I've worked at, at various levels and through various departments. At Google it was always "We don't take an editorial stand, this might be just what some of our customers want." That has been the most interesting aspect of their recent moves to either sanction advertisers or block them. So somewhere in there it has gone from "If people don't want to see ads there are lots of adblockers out there to choose from." to "We need to take a stand against abusive advertisers." And that is a huge difference in approach. Do engineers need a Hippocratic oath? I'm not sure they do, but if we forced some liability on companies for what the software they sell does, that would change a lot of things fairly quickly.

artificial 9y ago
>if we forced some liability on companies for what the software they sell does, that would change a lot of things fairly quickly. Absolutely that would change things, especially the cost of software.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  I'm so tired of people saying stuff like this as if I should care. Go ahead, raise prices. If your product is solving a real problem, people will pay for it. If not, well, we didn't need you anyway. This is, incidentally, how capitalism is supposed to work. If your business model doesn't work without you doing bad things, then it shouldn't work. You don't have a god-given right to make money and if you can't make money doing prosocial things, you don't deserve to make money. Free software has been doing the right thing for decades. The internet of the 90s before everything was carefully tracked and to addict and display ads was better. There are lots of incentives besides money out there and if money is the only one you care about, I'm not on your side.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    Usually the unethical things are designed to corner customers into spending more: DRM, proprietary game server hosting, etc. The problem we have with capitalism now is that it is abused by large corporations who fight for their right to monopolize and abuse customers. What everyone else has lost is the right to compete without abusing customers.

QML 9y ago

Honestly, there should just be a required ethics component to all college curriculums; I am not sure why it needs to be technologically focused. I would actually say the tech industry is the least of our worries with concerns to ethics; the last two years, tech has been heavily criticized and as a result it seems that people in the field are willing to change. Can't say the same about any other industry.

spydum 9y ago
Is this not common? Even at junior collgss ethics is typically a first year requirement

lostcolony 9y ago

That's one thing that, in hindsight, I quite liked about undergrad CS at Georgia Tech. CS4001, Computer Ethics, was required. It didn't try to push a specific worldview, but rather asked people to consider the ramifications of technical (and business) decisions, to discuss them, and to recognize the stakeholders beyond just the company paying. At the time I went through it, DRM was a big topic, and big data concerns were beginning to be (especially as noted that the problem was more than just what you stored, it was what -everyone- stored, and the ability to correlate it; you had to consider what else was out there). I imagine the latter now dwarfs the former.

foxrider 9y ago

I think it's a dubious waste of time, because forcing people to take ethics classes wouldn't meant that they are going to stick to the proposed ethics. I've took ethics class in my Uni back in the day because I was curious what it was about and it also was a fairly easy one to pass. The prof was nice and informative, but her conclusions were something I would disagree with all the time, and I left the course only with knowledge of some historical stuff, but none of my views on what's ethical and what's not had not been changed. If anything I only got to solidify my position based on facts provided by her. Unless people would adopt these ethics willfully there is no forcing them to.

fortythirteen 9y ago

I tend to tune out every time a journalist cites the main problem with "the dark side of tech" as "fake news". Firstly, it's devolved into a term to play upon the confirmation bias of people who think those who hold a different opinion than them did not arrive there out of differing life experience, but because they must be either stupid or evil. Secondly, there are many dark sides of tech that are of greater importance than what is usually a subjective assessment that news is fake; such as unfettered personal data mining, engineered addictiveness, cooperation with oppressive governments, and growing soft-censorship of users whose politics differ from that of major platforms' operators.

ilamont 9y ago

I attended the ARinAction summit earlier this month, and heard an interesting tidbit from the MIT Media Lab's Pattie Maes: She requires new students joining her program to watch Black Mirror (1). In contrast, when I attended business school one of the models held up to us in the very first week was the team at Harrah's who designed a loyalty program for frequent gamblers (2). I remember one of the professors or someone in a video interview we watched crowing, "it was like printing money." Neither the case nor the instructor had anything to say about the fact that this was basically a technology-driven scheme to extract as much money as possible from members of the public, including gambling addicts and other vulnerable populations. The "big question" at the conclusion of the case reads: When asked about the company’s long-term vision for its RM system, a member of Harrah’s RM team became thoughtful for a moment. He responded that, while all of the near and longer-term developments described above were critical, he thought there was one important aspect of all RM systems that needed further development. "What I’d really like to know — and I pose this as a question for researchers in revenue management — is how to integrate information about price elasticity into these systems. Clearly, changes in price affect the level of demand we experience. However, none of the systems we are familiar with capture this effect." 1. https://theoutline.com/post/3167/black-mirror-mit-class?zd=4&zi=rgwp4nu7 https://theoutline.com/post/3167/black-mirror-mit-class?zd=4... 2. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/ited.1090.0031cs https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/ited.1090.003...

oakgrove1 9y ago

Universities need more fluff courses so they can pump out more people with scam degrees. It fulfills the goals of creating more busywork trash courses and also pushes mind-control propaganda.

workthrowaway27 9y ago

I doubt these ethics courses do anything to change people's behavior.

jakelarkin 9y ago

great, but how about also focusing on the MBAs and non-tech background managers/execs that fill out the 5-10 levels of hierarchy above line engineers at any BigTechCo. Not like bottom-of-the-rung SWEs necessarily have visibility or control of the company selling some ads to customers using them for dis-information campaigns. Or how about teaching fact-checking & propaganda skepticism to ALL citizens. too often the problems currently ascribed to "tech" are problems of society as whole.

zombieprocesses 9y ago

We already have ethics in the philosophy department. I'm was CS major and I took ethics and liked it so much I double majored in CS and philosophy. Ethics has no place in CS, nor more than ethics is required in biology or physics or algebra. If universities want students to learn about ethics, then make ethics 101 a "required elective".

matt4077 9y ago
Many natural science programs actually have classes in ethics, sometimes mandatory, sometimes as an elective. The Technical University here in Berlin, Germany, has one of the most respected departments of philosophy in the country. The reason: After WW2, the British mandated that "hard" sciences should never again be taught without ethics.
MereInterest 9y ago
Your comparisons are rather odd, given that most universities do have ethics requirements for the sciences, focused on examples from the field in question. Biology: Do not repeat the Tuskegee experiements. Do not be the next Andrew Wakefield. Physics: Do not falsify data. Do not plagiarize results. Do not play fast and loose with statistics. I can definitely see corresponding examples being made for issues that affect CS. CS: Do not collect customer information that is not needed for the task at hand. Do not describe your machine-learning model as being free of bias based on race/sex, if you was trained with real-world data that may be biased.
- Rylinks 9y ago
  Chemical engineering: If you don't know what you're doing, your reactor will blow up and kill people. Here are some cases where people didn't know what they were doing. Don't be like them.
- Zak 9y ago
  The examples from other fields offered here relate purely to the academic field, while one of your CS examples is very much related to software as a business. Biology as a business: don't try to patent the world's food supply. Physics as a business: consider whether your client is building a weapon out of your work and whom they might use it against.

pascalxus 9y ago

I've been a software engineer for over 12 years and have never had to make a single ethical decision. It's always, here's the spec: build it.

lovich 9y ago
Whether or not you choose to follow orders _is_ an ethical decision.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  The laws align pretty well with Ethics. Most things that are unethical are also illegal and hence won't be built by any legitimate company. How often do you think a company chooses to build something that's unethical but legal? Have you ever heard of a engineer who said to the PM or boss, "hey, i'm not going to build that because it's unethical". I've never seen that happen. have you?
  - lovich 9y ago
    Any payday loan company? The financial service companies that figured out how to obfuscate shitty assets and led to the 2008 recession? Companies that mine your data and sell it to the highest bidder and rely on hiding privacy settings or making it too complicated for most people to prevent? Companies like Equifax that hold on to important personal data and don't even do the bare minimum to protect it? To be honest I'm not sure how to even respond to the statement that the law aligns with pretty well with ethics. The law aligns pretty well with what the people with power want and in any study of ethics you quickly learn that legal != ethical

mikegerwitz 9y ago

I'm giving a talk in March at LibrePlanet 2018 entited "The Ethics Void". The lack of ethics in CS education is a core component of the talk. I'm neck-deep in my talk research right now, so if you are a, student, educator, or anyone else with thoughts on ethics in CS, I'd love to hear from you: https://mikegerwitz.com/talks https://mikegerwitz.com/talks Unfortunately, the codes of ethics, courses, etc that do exist largely ignore user freedoms (in a software freedom sense) and the host of ethical concerns that come with it. If you have examples that _do_ address those issues, I'd really appreciate hearing about it. And please join us at LP2018 (hosted at MIT)!

thomastjeffery 9y ago

In an IT-related class I had in High School, part of the course was a lesson in ethics. Part of the "lesson" taught that if you have a good/unique idea, you should patent it, lest someone else get the value from it before you do, and that you should keep your software closed-source lest someone pirate it. There was no voice for free software or against the absurdity of software patents outside my own vocal retorts. This was part of a district-wide course, and probably contained popular ideas used by many other districts. Another thing I see in schools/colleges is that Microsoft will give free licenses to the school and students for their software so long as it is used and taught. Free software takes a backseat, and people are taught to use - and prefer - Microsoft's proprietary tools. Microsoft gets to control their target audience, and be seen as doing something generous, not abusive.

tonetheman 9y ago

It is interesting but this is in direct opposition to "make money fast and do whatever you need to do." When shareholders come first there is no way ethics will ever be involved.

ssebastianj 9y ago

Don't forget "Dark Patterns" [0] [0] https://darkpatterns.org https://darkpatterns.org

bobthechef 9y ago

I sincerely hope that consequentialist ethics won't dominate those courses.

woodruffw 9y ago

I'm teaching a 1-credit class on ethical hacking[1] this semester at my university, and I'm really glad to see this issue gain serious traction in major CS departments. I only wish it happened earlier -- I wanted to help develop a (more general) CS ethics class around a year ago[2][3], but encountered resistance from instructors and professors over perceived impracticality and adding non-technical "burden" to the major. [1]: https://github.com/UMD-CS-STICs/389Rspring18 https://github.com/UMD-CS-STICs/389Rspring18 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14680425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14680425 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14106201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14106201

aoki 9y ago
kudos. ABET-accredited engineering programs have had to document instruction in design ethics for a long time. anybody designing a good CS curriculum should know that and be thinking about whether CS really ought to be different in that regard. berkeley has offered CS 195 [0] for more than three decades. [0] http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs195/ http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs195/

samzeisler 9y ago

This is incredibly long overdue and so important. My partners and I had designs on creating an ethical framework for technologists years ago but didn’t feel we had the platform or the reach to spread it. That’s no excuse for sitting Idly by and doing nothing but nonetheless, we are thrilled to see this now coming into play. I hope that the professors and professionals who are contemplating this will come together and form an alliance to create a national standard policy and statement around this.