UT computer science adding ethics courses to curriculum; KXAN, March 5, 2018

Alyssa Goard, KXAN; UT computer science adding ethics courses to curriculum

"Barbary Brunner, CEO of the Austin Technology Council, believes that what these ethics courses at UT are “a really valuable thing.” She explained that as companies in the tech world search for new ways to disrupt old ideas, it’s important to look at the human implications of what they’re setting out to do.

“This may be where the university leads the industry and the industry wakes up and says, ‘Wow that’s really smart,'” Brunner said. “For Texas to become a real tech powerhouse– which I think it can become — it needs to engage in the same sort of collaboration between higher education and the technology community that you see in California, that you see in the Seattle area.”

Brunner hasn’t heard many overarching discussions of ethics within the Austin tech world, but knows that individual discussions about ethics are going on at many companies, especially those related to security and artificial intelligence.

In the long run she thinks that ethics training may become one of many qualities tech companies look for in the recent graduates they hire."