CS 181/181W: Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy

CS 181/181W: Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy, Spring 2024

Course basics

Lectures	Monday and Wednesday, 1:30 p.m.–2:50 p.m. in 370-370.
Course calendar TBD
How to enroll	The class has limited enrollment: up to 75 in CS181W, and 50 in CS181.
Ed Discussion Forum	Please post questions on the class Ed Forum (link TBD).
Sections	Held on Thursday or Friday, starting in first week of class. Please fill out the section signup form.
Final exam	No final exam
CS181W only	181W students will meet with an instructor from the Technical Communication Program to revise and resubmit one of their assignments. Use this form to schedule your meeting with a TCP instructor.
Project	The major assignment in the class is a quarter-long project, culminating in a poster session and a presentation day at the end of the term. Please read the final project guidelines and due dates.

Lecturers

Keith Winstein
Associate Professor of Computer Science

Email: Winstein email address
Office hours: Wednesdays, 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. in Gates 410

Chris Gregg
Associate Professor (Teaching) of Computer Science

Email: Gregg email address
Office hours: Thursdays, 1–3 p.m. in Durand 325

Course Assistants

Vionna Ateffi
Email: vionnaa@stanford.edu

Emily Bunnapradist
Email: embunna@stanford.edu

David Gottlieb
Email: dmg1@stanford.edu

Tori Qiu
Email: toriqiu@stanford.edu

Ellie Vela
Email: elijahjv@stanford.edu

Jin-Hee Lee
Email: jchlee@stanford.edu

Learning goals

CS 181/181W will focus on teaching:

how to recognize (how to train a grasshopper on your shoulder to be vigilant about noticing) when a decision you are facing has a significant ethical implication
how to reason about what should happen, consistent with the norms, culture, and experience of our discipline
how to make well-reasoned, persuasive arguments that can influence the course of events.

Coursework will include short online writing assignments (emphasizing the 400-word business memo), in-class exercises in making persuasive arguments out loud, and a quarter-long project. Attendance is required at lectures and sections.

Grading Breakdown

We will weight components of the course for grading as follows:

Writing Assignments: 40%
Project: 30%
Lecture Participation: 10%
Section Participation: 20%

Spring 2024 FAQ

Traditionally, CS181/181W is taught in a discussion-based, participatory format. With a cap of 125 students in the class, this will be the largest discussion-based class you have ever taken. We will do our best to teach you how to recognize situations with ethical import, reason about the right course of action, and persuade your organization to follow, and we'll do exercises in class and in section to help you hone your reasoning and persuasive skills. The class includes a major project that requires interacting with the world outside the Stanford campus. Attendance in the class is required to participate in the discussions; the class is not recorded.

Please read the course FAQ included here:

Honor code

This is a class on ethics. All students are expected to follow the honor code, to give proper credit for work and for ideas, to act with integrity, and to “take an active part in seeing to it that others as well as themselves uphold the spirit and letter of the Honor Code.” The course staff is happy to answer questions, hypothetical or otherwise, about ethics in academic work and in computer science—it's part of what this course is about.

Schedule

Date	Due before class	Content
Unit 1: risk and responsibility
Monday, April 1		L1 Overview of the class Goals Persuasive writing Intro to cold-calling Projects How to enroll
Wednesday, April 3	Please fill out: the section signup form (to come) Please read: NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct Medical Devices: The Therac-25 Sara Bernstein, "Causal Proportions and Moral Responsibility" Please complete: A Memo on the Therac-25 incidents (350 words)	L2 Responsibility
April 5		S1 First section meetings
Monday, April 8	Please read: Douglas Hofstadter, "Metamagical Themas: Sanity and Survival" Sade Hormio, "Culpable Ignorance in a Collective Setting" Please submit: An entry to the assignment due Monday at noon	L3 Risk and Reward Patrick Racing decision submission form
Wednesday, April 8	Please watch: (note: disturbing subject matter) Mayday: Air Disaster on the Iran Air 655 tragedy (part 1) Optional: part 2 of the same documentary Please read: [New] Richard Feynman, chapter about the Challenger disaster The Verge: The many human errors that brought down the Boeing 737 Max (May 2, 2019)	L4 Disasters and major failures
Monday, April 15	Please read: CS Lewis, "The Inner Ring" Ursula K Leguin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" N.K. Jemisin, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" Please submit: Your team's project proposal	L5 Risk redux
Wednesday, April 17	Please read: Peter Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1972 Wenar, The Deaths of Effective Altruism, 2024 Trolley Problems and Other Difﬁcult Moral Questions (Iowa State handout) Please submit: a memo about autonomous cars Slides from the lecture on Effective Altruism.	L6 Utilitarianism
Unit 2: AI discrimination and automated decision-making
Monday, April 22	Please read: First 8 pages of Marion Forcade and Keiran Healy, "Seeing Like a Market" (until "4 Ubercapital")	L7 Reasoning about uncertainty
Wednesday, April 24	Please read: Mark Colyvan, Helen M. Regan, and Scott Ferson, "Is it a Crime to Belong to a Reference Class?" Please submit: A 350-word memo about the reading You may find these examples of persuasive writing helpful: Example persuasive memo in a college setting Laura Kipnis’s “My Title IX Inquisition” Argument in favor of a universal basic income David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”	L8 Inference
Monday, April 29	Please read: Zittrain, "The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking," The New Yorker, 2019 Buolamwini and Gebru, "Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification," 2018 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency Ochigame, "The Invention of 'Ethical AI'", The Intercept, 2019 Starting today: CS181W students only should sign up to meet with TCP to revise one of their memos. Meetings begin May 6 and end May 28.	L9 Discrimination and ethical AI
Wednesday, May 1	Please read: Sam Corbett-Davies, Emma Pierson, Avi Feller, Sharad Goel, and Aziz Huq, "Algorithmic Decision Making and the Cost of Fairness" Reuben Binns, "Fairness in Machine Learning: Lessons from Political Philosophy" Please submit: 350-word memo about the first reading	L10 Fairness
Unit 3: Silicon Valley Inc.
Monday, May 6	Please read: Cutler, "East Of Palo Alto’s Eden: Race And The Formation Of Silicon Valley" (2015) Wiener, "Uncanny Valley" (2016) Fowler, "Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber" (2017)	L11 Participation in the tech industry
Wednesday, May 8	Please read: Scheiber and Conger, "The Great Google Revolt" (2020) McClelland, "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" (2012) Newton, "The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America" (2019) Please submit (before your section on Friday): Project midpoint report	L12 Working in the tech industry
Monday, May 13	Please read: Myanmar: The social atrocity (read Executive Summary and section 6: "The Mechanics of our Platform are not Neutral") Alexander, "Sort by Controversial" (2018)	L13 Content
Wednesday, May 15	Please read: Berjon, The Web Is For User Agency Roth, "The infinite scroll" (2020) Stoyanovich, Opinion: Google has been force-feeding us ads. Now one big antitrust case could change the internet forever Please submit: A 400-word memo re: CloudDrive	L14 Information and advertising
Unit 4: Hacking and information
Monday, May 20	Please watch: Citizenfour (2014, 1h53) (alternate link) Please read: U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001) Green, Looking back at the Snowden revelations, 2019 Please submit: 300-word memo about the Kyllo decision	L15 Surveillance and privacyd
Wednesday, May 22	Please read: Jacob Ward and Lora Kolodny, The FBI has formed a national database to track and prevent 'swatting', CNBC (2023) Lora Kolodny, Elon Musk has pulled more than 50 Tesla employees into his Twitter takeover, CNBC (2022) Lora Kolodny, Tesla workers say factory paint shop has had multiple fires, causing more problems than Tesla let on, CNBC (2018) Lora Kolodny, Tesla is sued over air pollution from factory operations in Fremont, California, CNBC (2024) Sydette Harry, Listening to Black Women: The Innovation Tech Can't Figure Out, Wired Magazine (2021) Please come prepared with: One prepared question (please write it out) for Lora Kolodny	L16 The press (Lora Kolodny visit)
Wednesday, May 29	Please watch: Victor, "Inventing on Principle" (2012, 54 minutes) Please read: Richard M. Stallman, The GNU Manifesto (1985) Maria Bustillos, The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty, New Yorker (2015) Winstein, Real Dialogue: The Tech interviews Jack Valenti, The Tech (2004)	L17 Copyright, copyleft, and the joy of creation
Monday, June 3	Please read: Meditations on Moloch Monday's class will be composed of two parts: Ask Me Anything, Keith and Chris Edition. Please ask and upvote questions here: 181-AMA (log in with Event number 12345) Revisit a topic? If you would like us to (probably briefly) revisit a topic that you think needed more conversation, please fill out this anonymous Google Form.	L18 AMA / Revisit topics