Reading List and Course Outline
Below is a schedule of class topics and readings. They are subject to change by the instructors, and all changes will be communicated.
● Existing Codes of Ethics: ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, Artificial Intelligence at Google – Our Principles, Ethical OS Risk Mitigation Checklist
● Individual profiles: Ellora Israni, John Luttig, Henry Tsai, Chris Cox
● “Feynman’s Error: On Ethical Thinking and Drifting” by Dan Munro (Dan’s blog, November 2018)
● “Optimize What?" by Jimmy Wu
Supplementary:
● “Two Cultures” by C. P. Snow (The Rede Lecture, 1959)
● “Solving for Pattern” by Wendell Berry (Chapter 9 in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural, North Point Press, 1981)
● “Of Course Congress Is Clueless About Tech—It Killed Its Tutor” (WIRED, 2016)
● “Data Science as Political Action: Grounding Data Science in a Politics of Justice” by Ben Green (2019)
Algorithmic Decision-Making | Promise & Perils
● Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Introduction and Chapter 1 (Crown Publishing Group, 2016)
● John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 10-24, Section 3 “The Main Idea of the Theory of Justice,” Section 4 “The Original Position and Justification,” and Section 5 “Classical Utilitarianism,” (Harvard University Press, 1971; revised 1999)
Supplementary:
● “Algorithms, Correcting Biases” by Cass Sunstein (Social Research, 2019)