About one year ago, I became aware of the course "Ethics and Accountability in Computer Science" designed and taught by Rodrigo Ferreira and Moshe Y. Vardi at Rice University. The goals and high-level structure of the course, as well as its context, are described in an informative and thoughtful paper by Moshe and Rodrigo that appears in the Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’21), which I strongly recommend. You can also read a journal paper reporting on one of their course assignments, which was designed to make students focus on practising "deep attention" in the sense of artist and academic Jenny Odell.
I was smitten by the underlying tenet for their course, namely that "social justice is the single most important issue confronting computer science students today." That tenet is also very much in line with a reflection on the impact that digital technology has on social justice that the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gran Sasso Science Institute asked the Computer Science group at that institute to undertake. Therefore, after having invited Rodrigo to deliver a webinar on the course at the ICE-TCS+GSSI webinar series, I decided that, as an experiment, I would offer a version of the Rice University course to master students in computer science, language technology and software engineering at Reykjavik University during our spring semester 2021.
Mine was a foolhardy decision for a variety of reasons. However, I have always believed that computer scientists should strive to be the 21st century Renaissance men and women, and bridge the gap between C. P. Snow's "two cultures". Indeed, to quote Edward A. Lee freely, to my mind technologists ought to be amongst the greatest humanists of our age. Despite my other commitments, offering a version of the Ferreira-Vardi course at Reykjavik University felt like the right thing to do at this time.
I taught the course over twelve weeks to a varied group of eight students, in cooperation with Claudio Pedica. Thanks to the constant support I received from Rodrigo Ferreira, I lived to tell the tale and I hope that I managed to do some justice to the truly excellent course that Moshe and Rodrigo put together. Having a dream team of students with a variety of cultural backgrounds made the course extremely interesting and a learning experience for me. I had to refresh my memory of the philosophy I studied at high school in Italy in a previous life, learn some modern moral philosophy I had not met at school (such as the work by Elisabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, amongst others), read a substantial amount of new material (some of it fresh off the press as the course was unfolding) and broaden my horizons. I could not have asked for a better intellectual experience and the students in the course, from Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland and the Netherlands taught me well, kept me on my toes and stimulated me to keep reading material related to ethics even now that the course is over.
Teaching the course reinforced my belief that a course on ethics and on the impact that our field has on social justice should be required for all students in computer science. If you plan to run such a course, I strongly recommend that you consider the Ferreira-Vardi course as a blueprint.
2 comments:
Interesting post. But it is worth mentioning that a growing number of scientists and specifically computer scientists are concerned with the attempt to politicize CS, and detract from its beauty and truth-seeking, while promoting the view that "social justice" is an important aspect of computer science.
I for instance do not believe social justice is important, not in CS, and maybe not as important in comparison to other aspects of life in general.
Social justice is also a relative political term. Different cultures adhere to different concepts of justice and society. So teaching it to students is a slippery slope to something that can look like indoctrination.
Thanks for your interesting comment.
I am all for beauty and truth-seeking. (I guess you are using the latter term in the sense of seeking for "mathematical truths related to computation", as we do in TCS.) Moreover, I freely admit that, in my research, I never think about the consequences of my work for society, probably because there are none at all :-)
However, there is no denying that CS is a major force in shaping many aspects of the society in which we live. Thus, IMHO, it is beneficial for our students as well as for us to be aware of how CS affects the world both "positively" and "negatively". I, for one, tend to stress the positive impact of CS when talking to prospective students and can come across as a technological evangelist. Having said so, I often tell our students that CS gives them a super power and that with great power comes great responsibility.
I would not use the word "indoctrination" (rest assured that there was none), but instead emphasise "awareness", "discussion" and being able to explain one's intellectual position in a cogent way both orally and in writing. To do so, the Ferreira-Vardi course provides students with a grounding in ethical theories from philosophy (which, being brought up in the Italian educational system, I believe benefits everyone), discusses algorithmic bias and the impact that digital technology has on labour and democracy, amongst other topics. Since I gave the course with a computer scientist who has worked on UI/UX both in academia and industry, our version of the course devoted some time to dark UI/UX patterns (which I did not really know much about before) and to "practical ethics". (Claudio likes skin-in-the-game approaches to ethics.)
I feel that thinking about those issues enriches the computer-science worldview and that we could all benefit by mulling over John Rawls' veil-of-ignorance thought experiment, for instance, every now and again.
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