I'm teaching ethics of computer science to engineering students again this spring and while I'm probably keeping a lot of the format I used in 2019, I'm updating some of the readings. What are ppls recs for recent critical texts that undergrad engineers will be able to handle?
@ingrid Molly White has written a lot of good stuff about cryptocurrencies, much of which addresses ethics, but off-hand i can't think of a piece primarily about ethics, besides her piece on effective altruism: https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/effective-obfuscation
@alys "ethics" is honestly not my preferred framing either, generally what I'm actually teaching in the class is political economy and organizing tactics lol
@ingrid yeah, it seems like ethics would encourage a more individualist perspective than what you're going for.
@ingrid I used to teach this exact class. But my choices are all long obsolete. Curious to see what people use nowadays.
@ingrid Not sure what’s already in the format, but “Your Computer ais On Fire” https://bookshop.org/p/books/your-computer-is-on-fire-benjamin-peters/14466713?ean=9780262539739 and “Radical Technologies” https://bookshop.org/p/books/radical-technologies-the-design-of-everyday-life-adam-greenfield/11833876?ean=9781784780456 are my two recco’s.
@brandonleedy ah yeah Your Computer is on Fire is great!
@ingrid i recall What Tech Calls Thinking being pretty good but i don't have specific chapters to recommend, unfortunately
@ingrid Would Erin’s Myanmar essays be at all relevant?
@beep extremely, although it might be a thing where I assign one and make reading the whole series optional/extra credit
@ingrid James Bridle’s “Something is wrong on the internet” https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2
@ingrid Big fan of @bentarnoff's "Internet for the People" (2022). I discuss it a bit here: https://schmud.de/posts/2022-12-05-different-internet.html.
It's an easy read and describes an internet that will be foreign to young engineers. It really demonstrates the power of policy over engineering.
That article also references Salomé Viljoen who I think is writing the most interesting research on personal data today.
@ingrid probably a bit heavy, but this might fit: https://cennydd.com/future-ethics
@ingrid Keyes', Hoy's and Drouhard's Human Computer Insurrection is good to have a discussion on articulating political commitments and ethical stances in technology design https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300569
current additions include excerpts from @beep's You Deserve A Tech Union, Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto, @Mer__edith's Logic(s) essay on Babbage and plantation economics, and Josh Dzieza's LLM labor long read in The Verge earlier this year.