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."
Issues and developments related to ethics, information, and technologies, examined in the ethics and intellectual property graduate courses I teach at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology" will be published in Summer 2025. Kip Currier, PhD, JD
Showing posts with label programmers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label programmers. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Saturday, December 1, 2018
It’s Almost 2019. Do You Know Where Your Photos Are?; The New York Times, November 29, 2018
John Herrman, The New York Times; It’s Almost 2019. Do You Know Where Your Photos Are?
"Jason Scott is a founder of Archive Team,
a loose network of archivists and programmers that creates tools for
extracting data from services that are at risk of disappearing. Flickr
has given users options to export everything from the site; the Archive
Team is working on alternatives, just in case.
“The sad thing about the tech industry is they built everything on subsidized lies: ‘This is going to cost you nothing and you’re
going to get amazing things,’” Mr. Scott said. It’s not as easy to
imagine a future without Google as it might have been to imagine a
future without Zing, or even Yahoo. But it shouldn’t be hard.
“It’s
100 percent like Flickr,” Mr. Scott said. “Tech companies are still
selling a lot of very neophyte people a lot of problematic lies about
things that matter a lot to them.”"
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