Computing's social obligation

The cover of the August issue of Communications of the ACM showcases Harvard's impressive experiment integrating ethics throughout its undergraduate computer science curriculum [6]. Anyone currently grappling with exploding enrollments must applaud Harvard's deliberate use of resources to broaden CS education beyond its traditional technical components. In a similar vein, ACM recently updated its professional code of ethics, calling on CS professionals to acknowledge "all people are stakeholders" and to "ensure that the public good is the central concern during all professional computing work," [1] possibly adding to the pressure many in CS education may be feeling to 'up their game' when it comes to their programs' attention to ethics. Unsurprisingly, doing ethics in CS can seem like yet another requirement tasked to an already overburdened system. If one is operating under constraints, perhaps limited by shortages in money and personnel, ethics, or put another way, instilling concern for computing's impact on society, starts to seem like a luxury: something that we all agree is valuable and that would be nice to have if we can afford it. But, what happens if learning about ethics is just as fundamental to software engineering as procedural abstraction or just as crucial to data science as learning to avoid spurious correlation

Curriculum · Engineering ethics · Ethical code · Feeling · Information ethics · Obligation · Political science · Professional responsibility · Public relations · Sociology · Work (physics) · Computer Science · Engineering · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Ethics in Clinical Research · Law · Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data · Psychology · Social Psychology

• "Teach your children well" value-neutrality and CS202X

  Open Access•Richard Blumenthal•ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society•2021

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