Unit 1: risk and responsibility

• Goals
• Persuasive writing
• Intro to cold-calling
• Projects
• How to enroll

• the section signup form

Please read:

• NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers
• ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
• Civil complaint in D.C. v. DoorDash
• Analysis of new DoorDash pay system
• Sara Bernstein, "Causal Proportions and Moral Responsibility"

• A response to a classmate's first-day assignment (200 words)

• Douglas Hofstadter, "Metamagical Themas: Sanity and Survival"

• An entry to the assignment due Monday at noon

• Read entries to the Luring Lottery
• Enter case study decision (one per team)

• Sade Hormio, "Culpable Ignorance in a Collective Setting"
• Nancy Leveson, Medical Devices: The Therac 25
• New Richard Feynman, chapter about the Challenger disaster

• A memo about the Therac-25 incidents

• this signup form for virtual conference with the Technical Communication Program (TCP).

Please choose only one slot for a remote conference. Send a copy of your work to the TCP instructor at least one day in advance of meeting! TCP instructors will send you a Zoom link.

TCP team emails:

• Melissa Dabiri (mdabiri@stanford.edu)
• Andrew Kim (andrewhk@stanford.edu)
• Derek Knowles (dcknowles@stanford.edu)
• Mary McDevitt (mary.mcdevitt@stanford.edu)
• Lisa Modifica (modifica@stanford.edu)
• Jill O'Nan (jonan@stanford.edu)
• Evelin Sullivan (evelin.sullivan@stanford.edu)

• Madeleine Hayenhjelm and Jonathan Wolff, "The Moral Problem of Risk Impositions: A Survey of the Literature"
• The Verge: The many human errors that brought down the Boeing 737 Max (May 2, 2019)
• House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure Findings on Boeing 737 MAX

• Your team's project proposal to your CA

• CS Lewis, "The Inner Ring"
• Ursula K Leguin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
• N.K. Jemisin, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight"
• Selected readings on Theranos

Unit 2: AI discrimination and automated decision-making

• Mark Colyvan, Helen M. Regan, and Scott Ferson, "Is it a Crime to Belong to a Reference Class?"
• Cory Doctorow, "Our Neophobic, Conservative AI Overlords Want Everything to Stay the Same"
• Twitter thread on opaque credit scoring algorithms

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• Optional reading: Marion Forcade and Keiran Healy, "Seeing Like a Market"

• Self-Care survey
• A 400-word memo about the first reading

• Gary Malinas and John Bigelow, "Simpson's Paradox"
• Sam Corbett-Davies, Emma Pierson, Avi Feller, Sharad Goel, and Aziz Huq, "Algorithmic Decision Making and the Cost of Fairness"
• Karen Hao and Jonathan Stray, "Can you make an AI fairer than a judge?"

• A response to a classmate's "reference class" assignment (200 words)

• Reuben Binns, "Fairness in Machine Learning: Lessons from Political Philosophy"

• Solon Barocas and Andrew D. Selbst, "Big Data's Disparate Impact"

• Buolamwini and Gebru, "Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification," 2018 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
• Zittrain, "The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking," The New Yorker, 2019
• Ochigame, "The Invention of 'Ethical AI'", The Intercept, 2019

• A 400-word briefing to an employer about a reading in this unit

Unit 3: Silicon Valley Inc.

• Intro and chap. 6 of Margolis and Fisher, "Unlocking the Clubhouse" (2002)
• Cutler, "East Of Palo Alto’s Eden: Race And The Formation Of Silicon Valley" (2015)
• Peterson and Dinkins, "What Atlanta Can Teach Tech About Cultivating Black Talent" (2020)
• Rode, A theoretical agenda for feminist HCI, Interacting with Computers, 2011

• A 200-word response to a classmate's briefing

• Wiener, "Uncanny Valley" (2016)
• Fowler, "Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber" (2017)
• Chapter 7 from Valian, Why So Slow? (1999)

• Lee, "James Damore has sued Google. His infamous memo on women in tech is still nonsense." (2018)
• Lerner, "We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring." (2019)

• McClelland, "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" (2012)
• Bray, "Bye, Amazon" (2020)
• Newton, "The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America" (2019)

• Self-Care survey

• Newton, "Facebook will pay $52 million in settlement with moderators who developed PTSD on the job (2020)

• Alexander, "Sort by Controversial" (2018)
• Dash, "If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault" (2011)
• Roth, "The infinite scroll" (2020)

• "Google's iPhone Tracking" (WSJ 2012), "F.T.C. Fines Google..." (NYT 2012), "Google is Fined $170 Million..." (NYT 2019)
• Marvin, "A visual history of Google ad labeling in search results" (updated 2020)
• Muiznieks, "The Brave Browser is Brilliant" (2020)
• Narayanan, Mathur, Chetty, and Kshirsagar, Dark Patterns: Past, Present, and Future (acm queue, 2020)
• Kroll, Citizenship privileges and corporate performance reviews (2018)

Unit 4: Hacking and information

• Maria Bustillos, The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty, New Yorker (2015)
• Zittrain, The Copyright Cage, legalaffairs (2003)
• Jennifer Granick on "Ciscogate": Part 1 and Part 2
• Winstein, Real Dialogue: The Tech interviews Jack Valenti, The Tech (2004)

• Richard M. Stallman, The GNU Manifesto (1985)
• Hanson, The Role of Community in Free Software (2007)

• Citizenfour (2014, 115 minutes)

• U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001)
• Green, Looking back at the Snowden revelations, 2019
• Kirchner and Goldstein, How Automated Background Checks Freeze Out Renters, New York Times (2019)

• Rogaway, The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (2015)
• Gellman, Secrets, Surveillance and Snowden Washington Post (2020)

• A 300-word memo about the Kyllo decision

• Victor, "Inventing on Principle" (2012, 54 minutes) (this one is better)
• VPRO, "Beyond the emoji" (2019, 50 minutes) (this one is not as exciting but it has your instructor in it and it's about the ethics of emoji)

• Wakabayashi, Legal Shield for Social Media Is Targeted by Trump, New York Times (2020)
• Gabriel, The Rise of Worse is Better (1991)

• Self-Care survey

• Popper and Herrero, The Coder and the Dictator, N.Y. Times (2020)
• Munroe, Infrastructures (xkcd #743, 2010)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, "Section 230 Protections": Part 1 and Part 2

End of class Have a fulfilling and healthy summer!