Item — HN Reader

> Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better.

my uk mechanical engineering bachelors degree had a required module on the ethics of engineering which has always stuck in the back of my mind. i think we went over the bhopal disaster as a case study one week, although it was about 16 years ago now so i can't be sure.

i've rarely seen any ethics modules in computer science departments, at least here in the uk. and i think we sorely need them in general.

edit -- so i guess it's a UK thing xD though i am glad to hear that you folks in the US enjoyed your ethics modules too

9 comments

As others have said, my comp sci degree also had a required ethics course. But it’s also pretty silly to think that a single ethics course where people don’t pay attention is going to change the hearts and minds of students. No amount of discussion about therac is going to make someone question if they should really be working for palantir or raytheon

Every ABET accredited CS course (almost every CS course in the US I think?) requires an Ethics in Computer Science credit. I remember going over a lot of case studies, including Therac 25, but our course also included a lot of general grounding in ethics and philosophy as well, which I enjoyed a lot.

ah, fair enough! maybe it is/was a uk thing (admittedly times might have changed a little since i did my masters/phd).

at the very least i have a wikipedia article on therac 25 to read through now. so thanks for that!

also, yea i remember really enjoying the ethics module too. lots of discussion and not always a clear answer. was very different to the rest of the "one correct maths answer" in a lot of the other modules.

In my computer engineering undergrad ~8 years ago in the US, an ethics class was mandatory, but IIRC the CS curriculum did not have it, despite both leading to similar careers. My memory may be wrong though.

Edit: they do seem to have one now, so either I remembered wrong or they added it.

Edit 2: I remember enjoying my ethics class, we covered some of the usual examples, and also things like basic contract negotiations. But I think I still didn't register that these concerns were real at that time. It was easy to believe that I wouldn't be working on anything that impactful. This did change once I started work.

> But I think I still didn't register that these concerns were real at that time. It was easy to believe that I wouldn't be working on anything that impactful. This did change once I started work.

The case study i mentioned (it may not have been bhopal, but it was definitely based on something that happened in india) stands out for me because it really hit home about the impact and seriousness of some decisions we could end up making.

There was another time I remember the lecturer making a point of saying there was no single correct answer about something that caused a lengthy discussion. We would have to figure what's right/wrong out for ourselves going forward. That really stuck with me.

I was thinking about it differently. I understood the potential harm on paper, but I think I was still pretty immature. I thought I would be willing to put aside morals (eg working for companies like Palantir) to work on interesting cutting edge things.

But when I started working and found myself doing equally cutting edge research, but genuinely for the public benefit, I realized I definitely wouldn't be comfortable with putting aside my morals like that. Maybe I didn't really believe this was an option back then.

We are kind of seeing in real time what happens when an entire generation of engineers grows up without having seen Real Genius.

funnily enough i'd never heard of that film before o_o so i guess i know what i'm watching next! thanks!

Yeah I was wondering about that… I got one, but prolly only because my uni put CS under the engineering school.

I don’t think scientists usually have mandatory ethics classes and mathematicians certainly don’t, so if it falls under either of those departments it might’ve gotten skipped!

I pull from these articles when teaching:

'We should teach our Students what Industry doesn’t want', Kevin Ryan, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3377814.3381719

'Are you sure your software will not kill anyone?', Nancy Leveson, https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/136281.2

I wouldn't be surprised if some students don't want it too.

ooo these look interesting. thanks! i shall have a read.

The 90ies weren't perfect, but it felt more idealistic to me, with the rise of open source software. People thought about ethics a bit more. It felt like the ultimate tide rising to empower people locally on their own computers, and that tide has been going out for some years. A bit with cloud computing, and now a lot more with LLM's. And the company a lot of SV people keep these days is pretty gross.

I wouldn't necessarily say "idealistic," but certainly constrained. Microsoft has always been scummy in one form or another, but always-on internet connectivity has allowed them to be scummy in persistent ways long after your purchase of their product. It's a serious money-maker, but I think that explosive growth has bred a whole generation of tech "professionals" these days that think more like Wall Street bros than sober engineers: make line go up, damn the consequences.

FWIW: I had a mandatory ethics class in my US program (Vanderbilt, a rich private school in the American south). It was mandated for all engineers AFAIR, and taught by an engineering prof.

Pretty good experience, too! Sometimes got distracted with general tech ethics rather than strictly professional ethics, but tbf that’s a very fun+timely topic

Ah, ethics - the silver bullet which will magically make good people out of bad people.

I went from being a largely self taught software dev with a small 1-man software business to working as a nurse in the US, and a lot of the motivation to make that change was that I wanted to spend my time doing work that I felt genuinely made the world better. Tech has incredible potential for good but the actual industry itself in my eyes has extremely perverse incentives and no strong moral foundation like that which exists in nursing/healthcare. Nurses broadly consider themselves to be patient advocates and the voice for people who often can't have their own voice. As you can imagine, this culture is not in line with the modern pursuit of healthcare profits but yet nurses stay fighting the good fight. I see these battles play out nearly every day I go to work and while it's usually done professionally these are real battles with jobs on the line.

In a perfect world I think the software industry would have instilled these same virtues- software is just as (or more) capable of causing harm as poor healthcare. Yet we seem to be racing to a dystopian future at record speed courtesy of the tech industry, and our modern egalitarian societies will not survive that transition.

My Computer Engineering degree had an "ethics" course (really a course on "engineering communications", but it was considered to satisfy the ethics requirement for graduation). It was a semester on how to file memos, cargo-cult your resume, and tell recruiters what they wanted to hear. Not a word was said about considering the implications of the things you're hired to build. When defense contractors took over the entire ground floor of the engineering building to hold a recruiting fair, we were encouraged to go.

The only time ethics in engineering was ever mentioned to me was in a class on applied number theory (cryptography), taught by a professor who had previously worked for the EFF. He went off-topic to tell us that many problems, like how to hit a target with a missile, may fascinate and compel us as engineers, but we shouldn't let that distract us into building instruments of death.

That course was an elective, and it was entirely possible to complete my degree without hearing a single mention of ethics.

There are many reasons I look back on my academic experience with disdain, but this one stands out to me.