Reading 00: Responsibility

Everyone:

Welcome to CSE 40175 Ethical and Professional Issues, which is a course where the goal is to get you to think about the ethical and moral issues surrounding computing and your responsibilities as a computer scientist or engineer. Unlike most of your CS classes, there will be no programming (or even math). Rather the course will revolve around reading and writing and discussion; it will be more similar to what you find in Arts and Letters than in Engineering or Science.

Course Overview

As you can see from the course schedule, we will be going through a variety of ethical and professional issues and topics related to computing including:

To enable robust class discussions, each week there is a reading assignment where you are expected to read articles, watch videos, or listen to podcasts, and then take a short Reading Quiz where you will be expected to provide a quote regarding the upcoming topic for the week.

Additionally, to provide an opportunity for you to think deeply, there is also a weekly Writing Reflection that will allow you to meditate on the readings and discussions for the week and to synthesize a personal analysis of your viewpoints.

To encourage creative expression and different modes of communication, you will also be expected to work on 4 group projects. Each of these projects will require you to reflect on the issues and topics discussed in class and to produce a group artifact such as:

  1. Movie Analysis
  2. Letter to the Editor
  3. Public Policy / Position Paper
  4. Crash Course Video

Further explanation on these group projects will be provided in the future.

Readings

The readings for the first week of class revolve around broadly exploring what ethics means in the context of engineering and what it means to be a Notre Dame computer scientist and engineer:

  1. A Framework for Making Ethical Decisions

  2. Seven themes of Catholic Social Teaching

  3. Engineering Ethics: The Conversation without End

  4. To Serve Man, with Software

  5. Parable of Talents

  6. Programming, power, and responsibility

These videos are also relevant:

What Most Schools Don't Teach

Uncle Ben - With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Karlie Kloss: Coding is a Superpower

Optional

  1. The Techlash Has Come to Stanford

  2. Silicon Valley Writes a Playbook to Help Avert Ethical Disasters

  3. Modern Medicine

  4. The code I’m still ashamed of

  5. Programming is not a Super-Power

  6. Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

Sharing

If you find a relevant article or video, please share them in the Slack channel for everyone to see.

Quiz

Once you have completed the readings, fill out the following quiz:

Notre Dame Login

To view and submit the form below, you need to be logged into your Notre Dame Google account. The easiest way to do this is to login to gmail.nd.edu and then visit this page in the same browser session.

Note, you can view the initial quiz score after you submit your responses. If you get any answers wrong, you can go back and adjust your answers as necessary. After the deadline has passed, any wrong answers will be given partial credit.