Computer Ethics

Required:

• Read "Be Careful What You Code For" [url] by danah boyd, 2016 (2 pages).

  danah boyd, a researcher at Micosoft and at Data and Society, highlights just how few guardrails there are for developers, from the consequences of algorithmic bias to the implications of crazy metaphors. She offers a call to action, solutions, and ample evidence for considering the implications of code. We highly recommend chasing down some of the links provided.

• Read "Why the Luddites Matter" [url] by Z.M.L., 2018 (5 pages).

  “That which makes the Luddites so strange, so radical, and so dangerous is not that they wanted everyone to go back to living in caves (they didn’t want that), but that they thought that those who would be impacted by a new technology deserved a voice in how it was being deployed.”

• Read "Telephone operation was a good career for women. Then it got automated." [pdf] [url] by Dylan Matthews, 2023 (9 pages).

  When ATT moved from human operators to digit dialing, a huge number of jobs were automated away. What happened to the people who had those jobs – and those who might have gone into those careers a few later? And what were the economic benefits of this huge transition?

Optional:

• Read "Organizational Frictions and Increasing Returns to Automation: Lessons from AT&T in the Twentieth Century" [pdf] by James Feigenbaum et al., 2021 (26 pages).

  Digit dialing was invented a hundred years before the job of telephone operator was automated away. In this interesting recent paper, Feigenbaum and Gross dive into the organizational and technological reasons for the delay.

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Before Class:

• Daily assignment, due at 8pm the night before class:
  • What do you want to get out of our class discussions?
  • Do you feel able to change outcomes of how tech affects society?
• Preview the course syllabus, particularly the assignments.

Required:

• Read "Chapter 1: Conceptualising Data" [pdf] by Rob Kitchin, 2014 (25 pages).

  The introduction to the book describes ways of thinking about what data is (ontologies) and goes on to discuss ethical and political considerations of data. It postulates the framework of “data assemblages” and how thoughts about them influence their own conceptions.

• Read "On Being a Data Skeptic" [pdf] by Cathy O'Neil, 2014 (19 pages).

  This rapid-fire, well-articulated article is about the advantages and perils of data science, with ample advice and examples to advocate for why those who use data ought to be this special kind of “skeptical”.

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Before Class:

• Daily assignment, due at 8pm the night before class:

  Use the following questions as a resource to guide your reading. Then, respond to a few of them, or otherwise on theme.

  • What is the difference between data, information, and knowledge? How are they related?
  • How can wider or economic concerns “frame” data? That is, in what sense do data act and how? (Answers might include: as an economic resource, as a form of power or knowledge, etc.) Explain why.
  • How have politics or economics influenced how some data have been defined or created?
  • What are reasons or incentives for controlling:
    • The creation of data
    • The access to data
    • The standards of data, such as metrics or units
    • The means of data collection, such as sensors or know-how
  • From “On being a data skeptic” explain “measuring the distortion.”
  • What is the relationship between models and proxies? Why are proxies used? Give an example.
  • Why might O’Neil have singled out “nerds” and “business people” separately? What do the differences in her comments indicate about how those groups view problems differently? Do you agree?
  • Submit a clarifying question which you’d like to discuss in class.

Required:

• Read introduction (pg. 1 - 16; 31 - 32; 17 pages total) from "Sorting things out: classification and its consequences" [pdf] by Geoffrey C. Bowker et al., 1999.

  Sorting Things Out is a classic text on classification and standardization. The introduction writes about the importance of considering the ubiquity of classification and the processes that generate them, standardize them, and enforcement. It also looks at how classification has caused harm and how the processes which create standards can at times yield an inferior solution. The authors take an expansive view of classification, so be prepared to think about the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) or VHS vs. Betamax.

• Read "Do algorithms reveal sexual orientation or just expose our stereotypes?" [url] by Blaise Aguera y Arcas et al., 2018 (5 pages).

  This essay sets out to debunk a scientific study which claimed to have built a “sexual orientation detector” using machine learning. “Do algorithms reveal sexual orientation or just expose our stereotypes?” presents a thorough analysis of the offending paper and shows that one move to debunk “junk science” is validate the study’s results against some other baseline. In this case, the authors use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. As you’re reading this, think about what one can learn from a face?

Optional:

• Read chapter one (pg. 46 - 50 from "Infrastructure" on) from "Sorting things out: classification and its consequences" [pdf] by Geoffrey C. Bowker et al., 1999 (377 pages).

• Explore "Datasets Have Worldviews" [url] by Dylan Baker, 2022.

  Check out this interactive demo about classification.

• Read "Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images." [url] by Yilun Wang et al., 2017.

  This is the article critiqued by “Do algorithms…”

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Before Class:

• Daily assignment, due at 8pm the night before class:
  • “Do algorithms…” claims to focus on the underlying “science.” Why do you think the authors did so? Why was this distinction important?
  • What strategies did “Do algorithms…” use to make its argument?
  • The authors of “Do algorithms…” conclude that the paper they examined was misguided. Drawing on the discussion of classification in “Sorting Things Out,” think of another misguided method (any method, scientific or otherwise, and not necessarily one related to the “Do Algorithms” paper). Now, describe that misguided method which you have identified.

Required:

• Read introduction and chapter one from "Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men" [pdf] by Caroline Criado-Perez, 2019 (25 pages).

  Criado-Perez investigates the gender gap in big data, describing the adverse effects for women caused by holes in data gathering, lack of consideration of women’s distinct needs, and more.

• Read "Being Glue" [url] by Tanya Reilly.

  Staff engineer Tanya Reilly discusses the work that holds technical teams together - key to senior software engineers, but often unrewarded or even punished in junior devs. You can also watch a video of this talk if you prefer.

• Read "Patriarchy, technology, and conceptions of skill" [pdf] by Judy Wajcman, 1991 (16 pages).

  When considering the future of work, one question that’s often raised is how technology negatively impacts the amount of “skill” required to complete a task, aka “deskilling”. In “Patriarchy, Technology, and Conceptions of Skill”, Judy Wajcman questions the underlying assumption that skill is entirely technically derived. Instead, she considers how men’s historical control over technology in the workplace has extensively influenced the ideological and material conceptions of skill, thus concluding in part that “definitions of skill, then, can have more to do with ideological and social constructions than with technical competencies which are possessed by men and not by women”.

Optional:

• Read "Introduction: Why Data Science Needs Feminism" [pdf] [url] by Catherine D'Ignazio et al., 2020.

  Through a historical examination of women in technology, D’Ignazio and Klein, both leading scholars in the field, introduce us to feminism and its role in shaping technologies. This is just a taste and the whole book is worth a read.

• Read "Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment" [url] by Helen Hester, 2016 (10 pages).

  This essay surveys a history of “electronic secretaries” to frame relevant questions of today’s tech, such as: Why are AI assistants so often feminized? We question what it means for technology to “do gender” and in service of which “imagined technology user”? Yet we can turn that question around and ask who “does technology”? and how does labor gets redistributed with the introduction of new software and AI assistants? Ultimately, Hester asks us to confront questions concerning lived experiences of gender and how its programmed, productive vs. reproductive labor, and the (dis)advantages of automation.

• Read "Testosterone rex: unmaking the myths of our gendered minds" [url] by Cordelia Fine, 2017.

  If you were looking to throw the book at someone who continues to insist that sex differences are sufficient to explain gender differences, this would be that book. Take her word for it: “Every influence is modest, made up of countless small instances of its kind. That’s why everything—a doll packaged in pink, a sexist joke, a male-only expert panel—can seem trivial, of intangible effect. But that’s exactly why calling out even seemingly minor points of sexism matters. It all adds up, and if no one sweats the small stuff, the big stuff will never change.” And it’s funny, too: “If we stop believing that boys and men are emotional cripples and fly-by-night Casanovas who just want sex, and start believing that they’re full, complete human beings who have emotional and relational needs, imagine what might happen.”

• Read "Gender Equality Paradox Monkey Business: Or, How to Tell Spurious Causal Stories about Nation-Level Achievement by Women in STEM" [url] , 2020 (5 pages).

  A widely known study argued that countries with more gender equity in society have fewer women studying STEM, but this article accompanies a peer-reviewed publication casting doubt on the study’s analysis – a scholarly back-and-forth also playing out in the blogosphere.

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Before Class:

• Daily assignment, due at 8pm the night before class:
  • Why is feminism relevant to data science?
  • Wacjman writes about the “way in which capitalist social relations affect technological design”. Reflect on how social relations more broadly may be affecting the team dynamics described in Reilly’s talk “Being Glue”, or on some of the many sociotechnical examples in Criado-Perez’s “Invisible Women”. How and why do you think these situations have prioritized some people’s lives and roles over others?

Required:

• Read Excerpt from chapter one, "STORIES CHANGED BY AN ALGORITHM" (12 pages), Interlude (4 pages) and excerpt from chapter two, from "WHICH ALGORITHMS ARE HIGH STAKES" to the end (20 pages) (36 pages total) from "Voices in the code" [pdf] by David Robinson, 2022.

  Robinson delivers a poignant and approachable introduction to the question of how to govern AI and other algorithmic decision systems by both surveying the field and opening a case study on kidney transplants.

• Read the introduction from "Automating Inequality" [pdf] by Virginia Eubanks, 2017 (13 pages).

  In the introduction to her acclaimed book, Eubanks captures the personal consequences of poorly designed decision systems, particularly on poor and working class people.

Optional:

• Read "Fairness and Machine Learning" [url] by Solon Barocas et al., 2019.

  Scholars Barocas, Narayanan, and Hardt collaborate on one of the most readable and insightful texts to address questions of fairness in AI, ML, and related decision systems.

Before Class:

• Daily assignment, due at 8pm the night before class:

  Chose one of the four governance strategies Robinson lists in his second chapter. Identify a technology or system (one not mentioned in the text) that you think could benefit from this kind of governance. Why?

Required:

• Read "It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech" [pdf] [url] by Zeynep Tufekci, 2018 (4 pages).

  Zeynep Tufekci considers how power to censor functions on our oversaturated social networks, and the role of misinformation and the attention economy in this. The article provides striking clarity to issues we collectively face on this platform.

• "How social media could teach us to be better citizens" [pdf] by Ethan Zuckerman, 2022 (5 pages).

  Zuckerman comments on historical aspects of social media, connecting to the mid-20th century, asking what social media does for us.

• Read Automatic Detection from "Custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media" [pdf] by Tarleton Gillespie, 2018 (14 pages).

  Tarleton Gillespie, a social media scholar, establishes the groundwork for understanding social media platforms. In this short excerpt from Chapter 4, “Three Imperfect Solutions to the Problem of Scale”, Gillespie considers algorithmic “automatic detection” techniques for content moderation.

Optional:

• "Custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media" [pdf] by Tarleton Gillespie, 2018 (37 pages).

  Tarleton Gillespie, a social media scholar, establishes the groundwork for understanding social media platforms. In Chapter 4, “Three Imperfect Solutions to the Problem of Scale”, Gillespie considers several models for content moderation, one of which is algorithmic “automatic detection” techniques.

• Read chapter 17 from "Genius Makers : The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World" [pdf] [url] , 2021.

  In this chapter of his book on the rise of neural networks, Metz, a veteran journalist of Silicon Valley, concisely describes the claims which some make about those tools. Will AI “solve” content moderation for us? Read on.

• Read "Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve" [url] by Mike Masnick, 2022.

  Will Elon Musk solve free speech? Read on.

• Read "The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation" [url] by Emily Bazelon, 2020 (14 pages).

  Read this article for an up-to-date account of free speech and its history in the United States. Notice the similarities between analog and social media. It questions how different governmental approaches to speech may be making us more or less free.

• Read "How Facebook Hides How Terrible It Is With Hate Speech" [url] by Noah Giansiracusa.

  Cut through the claims of AI content moderation and listen to Facebook’s own assessment that they ‘may action as little as 3-5% of hate … on Facebook.’

• Read "The Risk of Racial Bias in Hate Speech Detection" [pdf] [url] by Maarten Sap et al., 2019 (9 pages).

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Before Class:

• Daily assignment, due at 8pm the night before class:

  How would you change the governance of a social media site you use?

  Try to be specific in exactly what problem you are addressing and the trade-offs involved in your proposal.

  Your answer might include:

  • De-platforming
  • More automated moderation
  • Hire more moderators
  • Regulation…
    • e.g. changing liability of publisher
    • or otherwise

Required:

• Read "Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models" [pdf] [url] by Shaolei Ren et al, 2023 (10 pages).

  In response to criticisms of the high carbon footprint of generative AI technologies, Shaolei Ren and his team investigate the water footprint of generative AI - known to have caused tech giants from Google to Microsoft to miss enivronmental goals in recent years.

• Read "Generative AI's end-run around copyright won't be resolved by the courts" [pdf] [url] by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, 2024 (7 pages).

  Generative AI technologies rely on huge amounts of training data - information created and sourced by real people, who are not compensated for their work when chatGPT spits it out. Unfortunately, Narayanan and Kapoor argue that current copyright regimes (and those who try to use them to attain labor justice) are poorly suited to addressing the real economic and ethical harms of AI technologies.

• Read (stop or start skimming at "Language as the key to general AI") "Can machines learn how to behave?" [url] by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, 2022 (21 pages).

  Agüera y Arcas, whom we’ve seen elsewhere in class, makes the argument that there is no clear line separating what AI models can understand from what people do. The issue, in his view, is only that we need to teach those models what is and is not ok.

Optional:

• Read "What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud" [pdf] [url] by Gary Marcus, 2023 (6 pages).

  Drawing on increasing disenchantment with chatGPT and related technologies in the business world, Gary Marcus explores the consequences that might ensue if these technologies are not all they’ve been hyped up to be.

• Read "ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think" [pdf] [url] by Ian Bogost, 2022 (5 pages).

  Bogost playfully unpacks the implications of large language models such as GPT-3 from OpenAI. Do they work as our enthusiasm for them might project?

• Read "AI's Jurassic Park moment" [url] by Gary Marcus, 2022 (2 pages).

  Marcus, in his very abbreviated style, lays out why current large language models built on deep learning fail and why we might need another approach.

• Read "Language Models Understand Us, Poorly" [pdf] [url] by Jared Moore, 2022 (5 pages).

  Jared, who more than anyone else created this course and taught it many times, lays out a couple of views on language understanding. You can also review the slides.

• Read "Language Models as Agent Models" [url] by Jacob Andreas, 2022 (10 pages).

  Andreas makes the case that language models can rightfully be thought of as models of humans, of agents. The philosophical and historical context is a bit lacking here. Take cse490a1, the philosophy of AI, to really get into the details.

• "Inside the Heart of ChatGPT’s Darkness" [url] by Gary Marcus, 2023.

  Read this for some quite toxic examples of how ChatGPT fails to moderate its language.

• "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web" [pdf] [url] by Ted Chiang, 2023 (8 pages).

  Chiang, in an analogy which tugs at computer science fundamentals, compares language models like ChatGPT to lossy photographs.

• Read "Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases" [pdf] [url] by Aylin Caliskan et al., 2017 (4 pages).

  This is the classic paper which set off the debate about bias in langauge models. You can also check out Caliskan’s similar 2022 paper finding bias in image models.

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Before Class:

• Daily assignment, due at 8pm the night before class:

  What kind of issues are there in using large language models? Why might they be or not be a very good idea? In a sense: do they work?

Required:

• Read "Three Expensive Milliseconds" [pdf] [url] by Paul Krugman, 2014 (1 page).

  While reading this article, consider: who is today’s infrastructure for? What are some metrics being optimized for which have led to some (perhaps) unexpected consequences? How are these metrics and systems shaping our world?

• Read chapter two from "Geek Heresy" [pdf] by Kentaro Toyama, 2015 (21 pages).

  The classically trained computer scientist Toyama, in an excerpt from his book about realizing how Utopian tech fails the most marginalized, describes the role of tech as amplifying—whether for good or for bad.

• Read "Survival of the Richest" [pdf] [url] by Douglas Rushkoff, 2019 (3 pages).

  From Douglas Rushkoff, a noted media theorist read of, “Apocalypto – the intolerance for presentism leads us to fantasize a grand finale. “Preppers” stock their underground shelters while the mainstream ponders a zombie apocalypse, all yearning for a simpler life devoid of pings, by any means necessary. Leading scientists – even outspoken atheists – prove they are not immune to the same apocalyptic religiosity in their depictions of “the singularity” and “emergence”, through which human evolution will surrender to that of pure information.” This idea is investigated more deeply in his book “Present Shock”.

Optional:

• Listen to "Speed" [url] by RadioLab, 2013.

  An enlivening radio show which goes over many of the same concerns about speed as the readings.

• Read "Tech Leaders Justify Project To Create Army Of AI-Controlled Bulletproof Grizzly Bears As Inevitable Part Of Progress" [url] , 2022.

  The title explains it all

• Read "The Microsoft Provocateur" [pdf] [url] by Ken Auletta, 1997 (14 pages).

  This piece shows us the thinking of tech folks at a pivotal time when the nature of the internet was not yet decided. Skim the sections which are just about Mhyrvold’s life—we mean to focus on founders and their utopian visions.

• Read "Origin Stories of Tech Companies if Their Founders Had Been Women" [url] by Ginny Hogan, 2019 (1 page).

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Before Class:

• Daily assignment, due at 8pm the night before class:

  Oftentimes in computer science, we consider only the upshot, only the Utopian worlds we might create.

  • For one of the technologies mentioned in the readings or another of your choosing, comment on the future worlds we imagine for it (e.g. a Utopia) and complications to that future which might arise in practice (e.g. a Dystopia).
  • What are other utopias you have heard described when talking about emerging technologies? Do you find those utopias compelling? Why or why not?

Required:

• Read "Critical Race Theory for HCI" [pdf] [url] by Ihudiya Finda Ogbonnaya-Ogburu et al., 2020 (16 pages).

  This article calls human-computer interaction research, and computing research more generally, to explicitly attend to race, namely through critical race theory. Through this theory, analysis of the field, and storytelling, the authors show that despite (some) efforts in computing, racism persists and bares redressal. Pay particular attention to the stories.

• Read "Roles for computing in social change" [pdf] [url] by Rediet Abebe et al., 2020 (9 pages).

  This reading offers concrete suggestions specific to computing research. It advances four roles such research can play in discussions around fairness, bias, and accountability.

• Read introduction through page 16 from "Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new jim code" [pdf] by Ruha Benjamin, 2019.

  Benjamin, in a recent book, offers a “race conscious orientation to emerging technology not only as a mode of critique but as a prerequisite for designing technology differently.” Affiliated with Princeton’s Center on Information Technology and Policy, she brings a fresh perspective to many of the foundations of computing.

Optional:

• Read introduction (16 pages) from "Stuck in the shallow end: education, race, and computing" [pdf] by Jane Margolis, 2008.

  This introductory chapter details an early 2000s study which attempted to figure out why so few black and latinx students were enrolling in computer science courses. It, “shows how segregation and inequality along racial lines operate on a daily basis in our schools, despite our best intentions” (16).

• Listen to particularly minutes 15 through 30 from "Episode 12: Confronting Our Reality: Racial Representation and Systemic Transformation with Dr. Timnit Gebru" [url] by Dylan Doyle-Burke et al..

  Gebru, who received her Ph.D. from Stanford and then worked for Google before very publicly not working for Google, discusses the necessity of focusing on your values (hers being racial justice) in conjunction with your work.

• Read "Combating Anti-Blackness in the AI Community" [pdf] [url] by Devin Guillory, 2020.

  This reading is more about a computing research community than about the external impact of our technology, but each influences the other.

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Before Class:

• Daily assignment, due at 8pm the night before class:

  Answer at least two of the following.

  On “Critical Race Theory for HCI”:

  • What is interest convergence?
  • Why do you think the authors include information about their background? What does this achieve?
  • Why do the authors contend that theory is an important focus?
  • What does “true recognition of the pervasiveness of racism” (pg. 9) require?
  • Do you have any stories along the lines of those shared? Would you be interested with sharing any with the group?

  Choose one of the roles from “Roles for Computing in Social Change.”

  • How might your work as a computer scientist engage with your chosen role?
  • What social problem would you like to work on?

Required:

• Read "Digital Pregnancy Test Deconstruction (Twitter Thread)" [pdf] [url] by Foone Turing, 2020.

  This and the next reading offer informal Twitter threads with some surprising twists on how a technology actually works and why it may or may not be useful. Is this misleading people or providing an ethically valuable service or both? If you had chosen this for your project, what would you have investigated?

• Read "Response to Digital Pregnancy Test Deconstruction (Also on Twitter)" [pdf] [url] by Naomi Wu, 2020.

  (See above.)

Before Class:

• Daily assignment, due at 8pm the night before class:
  • Look back through the “relevant responses” underneath the required and optional readings for each class. Either provide two of your own which fit the theme or choose two from those listed.
    • Why did you choose these two? How would you categorize them? Describe the response taken. Might you act similarly? Why or why not?
  • Briefly reflect on how you may have reacted differently to the short readings for today a few months ago, now that you have mostly completed this class.