Ethically-tangled aspects of 21st century societies and cultures.
In the vein of Charles Darwin’s 1859 “entangled bank” metaphor—a complex and evolving digital ecosystem of difference and dependence, where humans, technologies, ethics, law, policy, data, and information converge and diverge. Kip Currier, PhD, JD
Showing posts with label ethics education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethics education. Show all posts
Our complex moral codes can be simplified rather quickly these days: “Wash your hands." “Wear your mask.” “Stand six feet apart.” Behold, the Ten Commandments are reduced to three."
"The higher education sector cannot ignore its role in
preparing students for the future of work as quite literally the purpose
it serves. That includes integrating ethics into comprehensive computer
science curricula.
Universities like MIT are leading the way
by creating research collaborations across disciplines such as law and
government, finding ways to embed topics around the societal impact of
computing into the technical curriculum.
This type
of rigorous education shouldn’t be accessible only to students who can
get into elite universities. As more jobs require engineering skills,
all institutions—from coding boot camps to community college courses to
advanced state-funded PhD programs—need to follow suit."
David Lee, The Scotsman; Does the data industry need a code of ethics? "Docherty says the whole area of data ethics is still emerging: “It’s
where all the hype is now – it used to be big data that everyone talked
about, now it’s data ethics. It’s fundamental, and embedding it across
an organisation will give competitive advantage.”
So what is The
Data Lab, set up in 2015, doing itself in this ethical space? “We’re
ensuring data ethics training is baked in to the core technology
training of all Masters students, so they are asking all the right
questions,” says Docherty."
But at a time when demand for qualified
computer scientists is skyrocketing around the world and far exceeds
supply, another kind of question might be even more important: Can
computer science be transformed from a field largely led by elites into a
profession that empowers vastly more working people, and one that
trains them in a way that promotes ethics and an awareness of their
impact on the world around them?
Enter Charles Isbell
of Georgia Tech, a humble and unassuming star of inclusive and ethical
computer science. Isbell, a longtime CS professor at Georgia Tech,
enters this fall as the new Dean and John P. Imlay Chair of Georgia
Tech’s rapidly expanding College of Computing."
"This summer, Blakeley Payne, a graduate student at MIT, ran a week-long course on ethics in artificial intelligence for 10-14 year olds. In one exercise, she asked the group what they thought YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was used for.
“To get us to see more ads,” one student replied.
“These kids know way more than we give them credit for,” Payne said.
Payne created an open source, middle-school AI ethics curriculum
to make kids aware of how AI systems mediate their everyday lives, from
YouTube and Amazon’s Alexa to Google search and social media. By
starting early, she hopes the kids will become more conscious of how AI
is designed and how it can manipulate them. These lessons also help
prepare them for the jobs of the future, and potentially become AI
designers rather than just consumers."
Gregory Barber, Wired; What Sci-Fi Can Teach Computer Science About Ethics Schools are adding ethics classes to their computer-science curricula. The reading assignments: science fiction. "By the time class is up, Burton, a scholar of religion by training, hopes to have made progress toward something intangible: defining the emotional stakes of technology. That’s crucial, Burton says, because most of her students are programmers. At the University of Illinois-Chicago, where Burton teaches, every student in the computer science major is required to take her course, whose syllabus is packed with science fiction. The idea is to let students take a step back from their 24-hour hackathons and start to think, through narrative and character, about the products they’ll someday build and sell. “Stories are a good way to slow people down,” Burton says. Perhaps they can even help produce a more ethical engineer."
"Ethics is something the world's largest tech companies are being forced
to reckon with. Facebook has been criticized for failing to quickly
remove toxic content, including the livestream of the New Zealand mosque shooting. YouTube had to disable comments on videos of minors after pedophiles flocked to its platform.
Some companies have hired ethicists to help them spot some of these
issues. But philosophy professor Abby Everett Jaques of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that's not enough. It's
crucial for future engineers and computer scientists to understand the
pitfalls of tech, she says. So she created a class at MIT called Ethics of Technology."
"Last spring, students in a new computer science social change course developed software tools for a disaster relief organization to teach refugee children about science and technology, a Chrome extension to filter hate speech on the internet and a mobile app to help doctors during a patient visits. Called CSCI 1951I: “CS for Social Change,” the course — now in its second iteration — was developed for computer science, design and engineering students to discuss and reflect on the social impact of their work while building practical software tools to help local and national partner nonprofits over the 15-week semester. The course was initially conceived by Nikita Ramoji ’20, among others, who was a co-founder of CS for Social Change, a student organization that aims to addethics education to college computer science departments. “The (general consensus) was that we were getting a really great computer science education, but we didn’t really have that social component,” she said."
"Developed in 2015, The Hague guidelines feature nine key elements that require consideration including safety, conduct, security and sustainability. In early April the ACS International Activities Office organised a workshop to discuss the possibility of producing a globally accessible document for chemists that addressed similar principles. Thirty chemists representing 18 countries met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and drafted the Global Chemists' Code of Ethics (GCCE).
‘To help determine categories to cover in the code, inputs from chemistry professionals in five countries were gathered about everyday situations they face where an ethical dilemma might arise,’ says Kabrena Rodda, technology and policy integration specialist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the US, who co-organised the initiative with the ACS and the US State Department’s Chemical Security Program.
The questions that were asked include: ‘How do you restrict access to dual-use chemicals?’; ‘If you discover a chemical spill caused by someone else, what action should you take?’; and ‘How should you handle a situation where someone senior asks you to do something you feel is not appropriate or ethical?’"