How the hell are you qualified to build a social media platform (or a search engine!) without learning basic concepts of sociology, politics, participatory journalism, ethical dissemination of information, etc?
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Tons of people have talked about the destructive path of moving fast, and not fully atoning for the things we break (perhaps most eloquently explained by
@KimCrayton1). This feels like something an entry level technology course should be introducing to students at a basic levelShow this thread -
Also, I graduated from a university that teaches computer science agnostically so I truly do not know the answer to how to fix this
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it was strange to learn that lots of these feeder schools don't actually have an eng ethics requirement. it's a graduation requirement for my school and you get to learn all sorts of niche & useful philosophy topics that I thought would otherwise be reserved for "discourse" twtr
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at least in my experience, requiring philosophy & humanities courses is much better than eng ethics / biz ethics types courses, which were facile to the point of absurdity
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Before math/cs I was in EE, & our uni's eng accreditation required freshers to take an ethics course, like you're describing here Defs time for cs to do this. We might not build bridges u could die on, but tech is clearly far reaching and needs us to be thoughtful+responsible
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if the past few years have taught us anything, we do in fact sometimes build bridges you can die on (metaphorically speaking). the fact that we can ship product that has killed people should certainly be telling us to start rethinking our priorities

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i think theoretically teaching a tech ethics course would be helpful, but you assume that lots of the students would care about what is being taught in these courses and that the way the content will be taught will be done in a meaningful matter.
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ya i helped run the berkeley one and it’s pretty much a farce. skimming over some of the students’ essays was enough to know how much they cared lol requiring some real humanities classes that are taken with non-cs majors is probably more effective
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when I graduated rice was just testing out a pilot ethics course and considering making a req. Sat in on the class and really enjoyed the emphasis on people-centered thinking, not tech-focused thinking. It's so easy to picture yourself building in a bubble esp. w school projects
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but "ethics" isn't something perceived to be "career-advancing" on your resume or emphasized in most interviews so it's naturally deprioritized by universities when they are optimizing for alumni at successful places
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