CS109: Ethical Foundations of Computer Science (opens in new tab)

(cs.utexas.edu)

41 pointsyunque7y ago5 comments

5 comments

This is pretty well designed - many CS ethics courses (of the few that exist) don't cover nearly enough. Seeing stuff like gamification, ethics of profit and behavior when in position of authority are some surprises I don't typically see.

erlend_sh7y ago

An incredibly important course. I hope it can be made open source so that more developers get exposed to it.

jimmy17y ago

I hope so as well. It's one of the reasons I advocate if not a CS degree, at least some kind of technical degree for developers. The courses that made the lasting impact on me from my college experience weren't the CS courses -- those were, regrettably, very forgettable and borderline outdated. But the ethics and the critical thinking courses from the philosophy department, (plus the more advanced mathematics required for technical degrees) all had much more lasting impacts on me.

jonathankkizer7y ago

While I haven't taken this exact course, having been in another of Abraham's classes I can say that Abraham is a great instructor that would be well-suited to designing this kind of course. The syllabus appears pretty comprehensive as well, which is encouraging.

pixelperfect7y ago

I took a similar class to this at UT in 2010, and at that time Sarah Abraham was the TA. It was a pretty memorable/enjoyable class. The homework often involved sharing news stories regarding CS ethics. One day I shared an article about Google's new self-driving car program, which was met with skepticism because the results seemed so much dramatically better than everything before :)

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