I’ll start with the punch line: I’m starting to get involved with understanding what innovative approaches are appearing in higher education throughout the world in educating students about the intersection of computing with ethics and social responsibility. I’m sure there are some equally innovative things going on at the K-12/pre-university level. If you’re involved with education in this area, or if you know of interesting work that others are doing, I’d love to hear from you – just email me at bobby@colorado.edu. In subsequent blog posts I will share things that I’ve learned, from you and from the higher education community.
I doubt one needs to say why this topic is important. Once upon a time, computer science was far removed from societal implications. We worked on writing operating systems and compilers – the things that go on inside the computer – or applications in business data processing and scientific computing. When computers impacted society, that impact was fairly far removed from what the computer scientist had worked on directly.
How times have changed! Computing professionals often now work on applications that directly impact the basic fabric of our society. This can be social network software that for many of us has become a dominant form of human interaction; or robotic systems that are or will be used as substitutes for human interaction in eldercare and maybe even childcare; or artificial intelligence systems that are used as the basis for making judgments in situations ranging from loan applications to judicial sentencing; and dozens more that you can readily add to this list.
The implication is that not only do computing professionals need to be taught, as a topic just as fundamental as programming or machine learning, to think in terms of the ethics and social implications of what they do – but that every citizen needs to have this perspective as well as they deal with computing systems that are ubiquitous in our society. Creators of computing systems need to apply high moral and ethical standards to their work and learn to think about the consequences, intended or not, of the systems they create; users need to realize that computing tools may have biases or harmful consequences, and aren’t necessarily perfectly trustworthy just because they come from a “machine”. This means that all students need to be exposed to these perspectives, beginning when they start learning computing in schools. I look forward to learning what you may be doing in this regard or just hearing your thoughts on this topic!
Bobby Schnabel, Partner Representative
