CS489 Computer Ethics and Social Issues (Autumn 2023)
Lectures
Time: 13:00-14:15, Mondays and Wednesdays Location: E3-1 Room 1101
Lecturer
Shin Yoo shin.yoo@kaist.ac.kr Office: E3-1 Room 2405
Communication
We will use a dedicated Slack workspace. Invitation links will be distributed later.
Syllabus
This course is concerned with a broad range of ethical issues that are closely related to, or have their origins at, computing technology and their uses. The aim of the course is not to find the answer to these problems. Rather, we will examine them from various angles together and discuss what we can do.
Another very important apsect of this course is that we will go through concrete technology that can help us while dealing with these issues. For example, instead of just saying that privacy is important, we will also look at techniques that allow you to effetively hide your data. Instead of just saying that a society should be fair, we will look at techniques that test large software systems for fairness.
Evaluation
- 30% Course Participation
- 20% Courseworks
- 50% Course Project
All courseworks and projects will be partially peer-evaluated: 50% of the scores will be based on evaluation from your peers, and the remaining 50% will come from the lecturer. This also means that, for each coursework and the project, you not only have to submit your deliverable, but also have to grade a reasonable number of submissions from others.
Prerequisite
- Active Class Participation: a non-trivial part of this course is in-class presentation and discussion. If you just sit quietly, you will not gain much from this course. Class participation is 30% of the whole grade. Also note that the entire class is in English, including the language you submit your assignments in.
- Strong programming skills: you are required to develop an individual course project. There will be also a number of hands-on sessions where we will program together during the class.
- Unix/Linux-savvy: you should be familiar with the usual build tools and Unix/Linux command line environments.
- Git-aware: you will be required to submit a GitHub repository as part of your project deliverables.
Teaching Assistant
Lecture Schedule
The schedule below is still tentative for now and may change, given that we do not know the exact class size yet. Empty spots will be filled as we move along.
- 08/28: Introduction & Admin
- 08/30: Perspectives on Ethics
- 09/04: Professional Computer Ethics
- 09/06: Our Ethical Dillemas
- 09/11: No Lecture - ASE 2023
- 09/13: No Lecture - ASE 2023
- 09/18: Technology and Public Discourse
- 09/20: Right to be forgotten / Automation
- 09/25: Managing the Social Internet: Lessons and Tradeoffs in Content Moderation by Dr. Joseph Seering
- 09/27: Class Discussions #1: Technology and Pandemic
- An open letter to developers of Mask Alimi (in Korean) (here’s a mostly machine translated English version)
- COVID-19 and Contact Tracing Apps: Ethical Challenges for a Social Experiment on a Global Scale, Lucivero et al., Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2020.
- 10/02: Public Holiday
- 10/04: Ethical Issues in Research
- 10/09: Day off for Hangeul Proclamation Day
- 10/11: AI and Ethics
- 10/16: No Lecture (Midterm Exam Week)
- 10/18: No Lecture (Midterm Exam Week)
- 10/22: Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Provenance
- 10/25: k-Anonymity and Secure Multiparty Computation
- 10/30: Environmental Impacts
- 11/01: Project Presentations - each team has 5 minutes to explain the topic they chose, as well as how it will be evaluated
- 11/06: Class Discussions #2: Humane Data Labelling
- 11/08: Open Floor - Hypocratic Oaths for Computer Scientists
- 11/13: Paper Presentations
- 11/15: Guest Lecture: Risks and challenges in Human-AI chat interactions by Hyojin Chin, IBS, and Hyeonho Song, KAIST
- 11/20: Paper Presentations
- 11/22: Class Discussions #3: Embedded EthiCS
- 11/27: Paper Presentations
- 11/29: No Lecture (Undergraduate Admission Interview)
- 12/04: Project Presentations
- 12/06: Project Presentations
- 12/11: No Lecture (Final Exam Week)
- 12/13: No Lecture (Final Exam Week)
Assignments
Policy on LLM Usage
The course policy on LLM usage for assignments is that you should only use it to correct minor language issues, and not to write the main article for any of the assignment. The whole point of this course is 1) to behave in morally responsible way, and 2) to have an opportunity to think about ethical issues around us. The assignments are in essay forms to achieve 2) in particular. So I strongly encourage you to do your own writing, after giving the topics some serious thoughts.
Assignment 1: Ethics, Computers, and Our lives
Pick a media coverage (e.g., a newspaper or magazine article) of an event that you think is related to both computer science and ethics. Write a minimum 1,000 words essay to describe what the ethical issue is, how it is related to computer science, and what your opinion is. Include a link to the article you chose: the article itself can be in either Korean or English (if you really have to choose something in other language, please contact me and explain why).
Due on 6th September before the class begins. Submit a PDF via KLMS (Assignment 1).
Assignment 2: The Use of Macro Programs
We are increasingly converting various services to online. When a mass scale infrastructure level service migrates to online space, we often face inconveniences such as waiting, service error, etc. As programmers, our instinct when faced with a boring and repetitive task is to automate it. The result is a series of macro programs that would either buy train tickets, do online course registration, book a vaccine appointment, or buy facial masks for you. Is this fundamentally cheating, or a valid use of a powerful tool (=computers and software) that are given to us? Should we sometimes accept personal level inefficiency just to become a good citizen? Write a minimum 1,000 words essay to express your opinion on this.
Due on 27th September before the class begins. Submit a PDF via KLMS (Assignment 2).
Assignment 3: Hippocratic Oath for Computer Scientists
Some people think that computer scientists should take what corresponds to Hippocratic oath that physicians take: you can read about the argument here. Your assignment is to draft your own version of such an oath. Also briefly discuss your thoughts about how taking such an oath can affect CS majors.
Due on 11th October before the class begins. Submit a PDF via KLMS (Assignment 3).
Assignment 4: Large Language Models and Communication
Write a minimum 1,000 words essay detailing your thoughts about how Large Language Models such as OpenAI’s GPT variants can affect our communication. Your task is to use one of such models to create a news article that is demonstrably not true: try to make it as believable as possible, but you should be able to show it is not true. After doing this, write a report about your experience, highlighting the following things: 1) the process you went through to generate the article that is not true, 2) your impression of how easy/hard the task was, and 3) your belief about how techniques like this can affect our public communication in the future. Submit both your report and the article you generated in PDF.
Due on 8th November before the class begins. Submit a PDF via KLMS (Assignment 4).
Project Aim
The aim of the term project is to put the practical knowledge obtained during the course to an actual use. Any project topic is acceptable, as long as it directly touches on the theme of ethics.
- You can develop an app (e.g., Ethical Decision Making AppStore, Google Play).
- You can write tools/frameworks that promote/implement certain ethical issues (e.g., secure deep learning using homomorphic encryption) and evaluate it empirically.
- You can design a human experiment about a topic related to ethics (e.g., something akin to The Moral Machine).
Choices are endless, but it has to involve some technical depths. There will be an opportunity to present the initial ideas and get feedback (Project sales pitch sessions).
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Project pitch: 5 minute presentation explaining what your project is. 1st of November.
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Project final presentation: Each team will record the final presentation (max 15 min), upload it on YouTube as an unlisted video (therefore not searchable), and post the link to the #discussion channel on course Slack by the end of 6th December 2023.
The submission of course project is by the end of 18th December 2023. Every individual should submit the following through KLMS:
- Group report: this should be a detailed report of your project, in whatever format that you think is the best.
- A GitHub repo link: As announced at the beginning of the course, you should also submit a GitHub repository that contains everything about your project. The link should be included in the group report.
- Individual report: this report should contain two parts - first, describe what your own contribution to the project was, and second, evaluate your team members using on a scale of 0 to 10, with a brief justification for your evaluation.
Recommended Reading List
This list is not an obligation, but contains highly recommended readings if you want to widen your views around the issues we will handle throughout the course.
- The People vs. Tech: How Internet is killing democracy (and how we save it), Jamie Bartlett
- Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music, Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, and Patrick Vonderau
- The Most Human Human, Brian Christian / 가장 인간적인 인간, 브라이언 크리스천
- Would you kill the fat man? The trolley problem and what your answer tells us about right and wrong, David Edmonds / 저 뚱뚱한 남자를 죽이시겠습니까? 당신이 피할 수 없는 도덕적 딜레마에 대한 질문, 데이비드 에드먼즈