Engineers need a required course in ethics; Quartz, November 8, 2019

Kush Saxena, Quartz; Engineers need a required course in ethics

"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."

What Sci-Fi Can Teach Computer Science About Ethics; Wired, 8/28/19

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."

Even The Data Ethics Initiatives Don't Want To Talk About Data Ethics; Forbes, October 23, 2018

Kalev Leetaru, Forbes; Even The Data Ethics Initiatives Don't Want To Talk About Data Ethics

"Two weeks ago, a new data ethics initiative, the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, caught my eye. Funded by the Omidyar Network, Mozilla, Schmidt Futures and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the initiative will award up to $3.5M to “promising approaches to embedding ethics into undergraduate computer science education, empowering graduating engineers to drive a culture shift in the tech industry and build a healthier internet.” I was immediately excited about a well-funded initiative focused on seeding data ethics into computer science curricula, getting students talking about ethics from the earliest stages of their careers. At the same time, I was concerned about whether even such a high-profile effort could possibly reverse the tide of anti-data-ethics that has taken root in academia and what impact it could realistically have in a world in which universities, publishers, funding agencies and employers have largely distanced themselves from once-sacrosanct data ethics principles like informed consent and the right to opt out. Surprisingly, for an initiative focused on evangelizing ethics, the Challenge declined to answer any of the questions I posed it regarding how it saw its efforts as changing this. Is there any hope left for data ethics when the very initiatives designed to help teach ethics don’t want to talk about ethics?"

Do We Need To Teach Ethics And Empathy To Data Scientists?; Forbes, October 8, 2018

Kalev Leetaru, Forbes; Do We Need To Teach Ethics And Empathy To Data Scientists?

[Kip Currier: A thought-provoking and timely piece, especially as I'm presently writing a chapter on research ethics for my ethics textbook and was just reviewing and thinking about the history of informed consent and Institutional Review Boards-cum-Human-Research-Protection-Offices. Medical ethics lapses like those involving Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study are potent reminders of the concomitant imperative for ethics oversight and informed consent vis-a-vis digital age research.]

"The growing shift away from ethics and empathy in the creation of our digital future is both profoundly frightening for the Orwellian world it is ushering in, but also a sad commentary on the academic world that trains the data scientists and programmers that are shifting the online world away from privacy. How might the web change if we taught ethics and empathy as primary components of computer science curriculums?

One of the most frightening aspects of the modern web is the speed at which it has struck down decades of legislation and professional norms regarding personal privacy and the ethics of turning ordinary citizens into laboratory rats to be experimented on against their wills. In the space of just two decades the online world has weaponized personalization and data brokering, stripped away the last vestiges of privacy, centralized control over the world’s information and communications channels, changed the public’s understanding of the right over their digital selves and profoundly reshaped how the scholarly world views research ethics, informed consent and the right to opt out of being turned into a digital guinea pig.

It is the latter which in many ways has driven each of the former changes. Academia’s changing views towards IRB and ethical review has produced a new generation of programmers and data scientists who view research ethics as merely an outdated obsolete historical relic that was an obnoxious barrier preventing them from doing as they pleased to an unsuspecting public."