Fall 2020 Course: Ethics of Data Science (HPS 1627 Living With Technology)

A prominent company recently realized the machine-learning algorithm trained on its past hiring data had learned biases and so was unsuitable for resume evaluation. But given competing definitions of fairness, how should we decide what it means for an algorithm to be unbiased? 

Machine vision algorithms are systematically less likely to recognize faces of people of color. Since many face recognition algorithms are often used for surveillance, would improving these algorithms actually promote justice? 

In a field filled with such vexing questions, the ethical issue most commonly addressed by the media is whether a self-driving car should swerve to hit one person to avoid hitting two.

In History and Philosophy of Science 1627: Living With Technology, you will go beyond the headlines to explore the ethics of technology. You will learn how to make ethical decisions when faced with crucial moral and epistemic issues in contemporary technology such as transparency, bias and fairness, surveillance, automation and work, the politics of artifacts, the epistemology of deep fakes, and more. 

HPS 1627 Living With Technology
Instructor: Kathleen Creel
Tuesday, 7-9:30 p.m.
Satisfies Humanities General Education requirement 
No prerequisites required—all welcome