There is now, at long last, wide concern over the negative effects of technology, along with calls to teach ethics to engineers. But critique is not enough. What tools are available to the working engineer to identify and mitigate the potential harms of their work?
I’ve been teaching the effects of technology on society for some time, and we cover a lot of it in my computational journalism course. This is an outline for a broader hands-on course, which I’m calling the Ethical Engineering Lab.
This eight-week course is a hands-on introduction to the practice of what you might call harm-aware software engineering. I’ve structured it around the Institute for the Future’s Ethical OS, a framework I’ve found useful for categorizing the places where technology intersects with personal and social harm. Each class is three hours long, split between lecture and lab time. Students must complete a project investigating actual or potential harms from technology, and their mitigations.
Each lecture is structured around a set of issues, cases where technology is or could be involved in harm, and tools, methods for mitigating these harms. The goal is to train students in the current state-of-the-art of these problems, which often requires a deep dive into both the social and technical perspectives. We will study both differential privacy algorithms and HIPAA health data privacy. In many cases there is disagreement over the potential for certain harms and their seriousness, so we will explore the tradeoffs of possible design choices.