The readings and discussion post for Week 3 are now posted: Week 3
Assignment and
Discussion
(note the deadlines for the discussion posts have been slightly pushed
back from normal weeks).
Please see the link to the Rally
Survey and submit that by
Monday.
A new version of the Schedule is now posted!
It includes the planned topics for the weeks, and should be easier to understand than the original schedule.
It worked out for every team to have their top choices as topics, and I think we have a good mix of topics through the semesters. Nothing is set in stone, though, so if your team decides you want to switch your topics (without duplicating something another team is already scheduled to do), let me know and we can change things.
Lead: Team 1; Blog: Team 4
Reading assignment: (for everyone)
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology, Introduction and Chapter 1 John McWhorter, ‘Racist’ Technology Is a Bug—Not a Crime, Time Magazine, 12 September 2016 Optional additional readings:
Aylin Caliskan, Joanna J. Bryson, Arvind Narayanan. Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases, Science, 14 April 2017. Latanya Sweeney. Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery, ACM Queue, 2013. Response assignments for Team 2 and Team 4:
Thursday, 4 February Slides for Class 2: PDF
Zoom as Unethical Software
VMRay Analyzer Report on Zoom
FTC Requires Zoom to Enhance its Security Practices as Part of Settlement, November 2020
Ethics of Vaccination
Novel 2019 coronavirus genome, 10 January 2020
Algorithms are deciding who gets the first vaccines. Should we trust them?, Washington Post, 23 Dec 2020
CDC Slides:
Mary Chamberland, Ethical Principles for Phased Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccines, 30 October 2020
Tuesday, 2 February Slides [PDF]
Please submit this survey by 4:59pm today (Tuesday): Initial Course Survey
Reading assignment: Ian Barbour, Ethics in an Age of Technology
This is from a 1993 book based on a series of lectures Barbour gave in 1989. Barbour considers three different views of technology: (1) Technology as Liberator, (2) Technology as Threat, and (3) Technology as Instrument of Power.
Before Wednesday at 9:29pm, post a response in the Discussion Site (see details there on what your response should be).
A draft syllabus is now posted: Syllabus. This will give more of an idea what is planned for the class, but is incomplete and likely to change before the class starts.
The Discussion forum is now open!
The semester hasn’t started, students in this class will be interested in this seminar on Monday at 4pm: Timnit Gebru: Computer Vision - Who is helped and who is harmed? Dr. Gebru has been much in the news recently, and I expect this talk will be relevant to topics we’ll discuss in the first few weeks of the class.
This post is preserved for persistence, but I am no longer taking additional students in the class through form submissions. If you are interested in joining the class, please submit this form:
https://forms.gle/xZECFhH7DNYHyc6X9 ### (or send me an email on ethical reasons why we shouldn't ask students to submit information like this using a google form). I’m not sure if the course will be over-subscribed, but if the course fills up, I will be able to add a small number of additional students to the course who I will select based on these responses.
This is the course website for “Everyday Ethics and Quotidian Quandaries for Computer Scientists”, a new University of Virginia course on ethics targeted to undergraduate computer science students that will be offered for the first time in Spring 2021. Scheduled course meetings are Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30am – 10:45am, starting on 2 February 2021.
Below, you can read a preliminary description of the course and about the reason for offering it.
