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."