Social Implications of Computing
Summer 2019
7/15 Jobs and Automation (Slides)
All readings are optional.
Brooks, Rodney, “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions”
Qiqong, Lin and Zhong, Raymond, “996 is China’s Version of Hustle Culture. Tech Workers Are Sick of It.”
Covert, Bryce, “The Richest Man in China Is Wrong. 12-Hour Days Are No Blessing.”
McKinsey Global Institute, “Harnessing automation for a future that works” and the “Appendix”
7/16 Income Inequality (Slides)
Singer, Peter, “The Singer Solution To World Poverty”
Bernstein, Raman, “The Great Decoupling: An Interview with Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee” PDF version
Hanauer, Nick, “The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats”
7/17 War (Slides)
Greenberg, “The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History”
Wakabayashi, Shane, “Google Will Not Renew Pentagon Contract That Upset Employees”
(strongly political, I am not endorsing the opinions expressed): Jurecic, “Why Did You Wait?”: Moral Emptiness and Drone Strikes
7/18 Western Politics and Global Media (Slides)
Tufekci, Zeynep, “Russian Meddling Is a Symptom, Not the Disease”
Kolbert, Elizabeth, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds”
Bertoni, Steven, “How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House”
Garrett, Resnick, “Resisting Political Fragmentation on the Internet”
Smiley, Lauren, “The College Kids Doing What Twitter Won’t”
7/18 Free Speech in the West (Slides)
Ellis, Emma Grey, “Win or Lose, the Alex Jones Lawsuit Will Help Redefine Free Speech”
Malcolm, Jeremy and Cohn, Cindy and O’Brien, Danny, “Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression”
Fisher, Max, “Inside Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech”
Stone, Geoffrey R. and Volokh, Eugene, “Interactive Constitution: The meaning of free speech”
Jeong, Sarah, “The History of Twitter’s Rules”
7/22 Privacy (Slides)
Popken, Ben, “Sites Spying on You in Weird New Ways, Princeton Study Exposes”
Menand, Louis, “Why Do We Care So Much About Privacy?”
Homayoun, Ana, “The Secret Social Media Lives of Teenagers”
Rachels, James, “Why Privacy is Important” ([VPN][vpn] required)
Powazek, Derek, “I’m Not The Product, But I Play One on the Internet”
7/23 Government Censorship and Surveillance (Slides)
Rainie, Maniam “Americans feel the tensions between privacy and security concerns”
Gallagher, “Senior Google Scientist Resigns Over “Forfeiture of Our Values” in China”
Kayyali, “FBI’s “Suicide Letter” to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance” and Gage, “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals”
7/24 Free Time and Attention (Slides)
Twenge, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”
Becker, “Why calling screen time “digital heroin” is digital garbage”
Tufecki, “Youtube, the Great Radicalizer”
Schwartz, “Finding It Hard to Focus? Maybe It’s Not Your Fault”
Harris, “How better tech could protects us from distraction”
Lil B, “The Age of Information”
7/25 Software Risks and Algorithmic Bias (Slides)
Software Risks:
- Nicas, Kitroeff, Gelles, Glanz, “Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions Into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change”
- Neumann, Peter G., “Risks of Automation: A Cautionary Total-System Perspective of Our Cyberfuture”
- Tufekci, Zeynep, “We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads” (video)
Algorithmic Bias:
- Angwin, Julia, “Make Algorithms Accountable.”
- Davies, Sam, and Pierson, Emma, and Feller, Avi and Goel, Sharad, “A computer program used for bail and sentencing decisions was labeled biased against blacks. It’s actually not that clear.”
-
Optional: “Attacking discrimination with smarter machine learning”
7/26 The Distant Future: Climate Change, AI, and Philosophy of Mind (Slides)
Aronoff, Kate, “Inside Geoengineers’ Risky Plan To Block Out the Sun”
Kind, Amy, “Qualia”, up to the end of section 1 (The Hard Problem of Consciousness)
Watch either of these (they are similar):
- Harris, Sam, “Can we build AI without losing control over it?”
- Bostrom, Nick, “What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?”
Brooks, Rodney, “The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI”
Brooks, Rodney, “What is it like to be a robot?”
Harris, Mark, “Inside the first church of artificial intelligence”
Wikipedia, “Climate change opinion by country”