1. The Case of the Killer Robot (online here) -- a fictional story, told as a series of imaginary newpaper articles, intended to raise a number of ethical and techncal issues.

2. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, Chapter 1, "Introduction: A moment of Opportunity and Challenge" -- [Note: you may safely skip the section called "Four Methodological Comments," but do read the section that comes after it, called "The Stakes of It All.]

Benkler's book, published in 2006, laid out an optimistic vision of the ways that the internet could make life better. But the chapter ends with a warning -- these good things will not happen if the companies that profit from the old 'industrial' information system are allowed to write the rules for the new technologies. Seventeen years later, what has happened?

Choose your format:

a. online here - HTML formatted with lots of white space for easy reading (but who picked this font?)

b. or here - PDF formated for saving paper when printing (18 pages)

c. or here - formatted to match the original printed version of the book (31 pages)

There is a PDF of the whole book online here.

3. Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, Chapter 1 (Optional - read this if you have time and interest after doing the other readings);. [Note: this is our class textbook, available at the University bookstore in printed and electronic editions.]

1. Quinn, Chapter 2, the first six sections, through p. 71; 
2. Excerpts from Kant (with notes);

1. Quinn, Chapter 9, the rest (i.e., section 9.6 on whistleblowing);
2. "Illusions of whistleblower protection" by Brian Martin,
3. Brian Martin's summary of Robert Jackall's discussion of whistleblowing;
4. Summary of Jackall's book "Moral Mazes" (pdf) by Damian Grace, University of New South Wales

1. Quinn, Chapter 3, sections 1, 3, 4, and 10 (skip section 2 on spam, or read it if you have time and interest; we'll read the remaining sections (5 through 9) next week);

2. Nicholas Carr,   "The Platform Is the Conversation" (Carr is the author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains. Here he is responding to the news from a few years ago that Facebook ran experiments on the emotional psychology of its users.)

3. Nat Eliason, The Destructive Switch from Search to Social

4. Andrew Sullivan on Internet addiction: I Used To Be a Human Being (I'm putting this last, even though I think it's one of the best, because it is rather long. Maybe you won't have time, but I hope you will.)

Some blame the internet for polarization and misinformation in our society:

1. “The Daily Me" by Cass Sunstein (From his book #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media)

2. Sunstein on Group Polarization and Cybercascades

[Optional: If you like watching and listening to people talk instead of reading, or if you just like to get a better sense of what a writer is like,  here’s a talk that Cass Sunstein gave (virtually) to an audience in Chile last October, going over much the same set of ideas that he wrote about in his book. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ay_DJGs_cc&list=UUKSa9-lO2UlFNEvkyW-GpEA  ]

3. An example from the Facebook files: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-knew-radicalized-users-rcna3581

But others blame increasingly propagandistic broadcast media (like Fox News):

4. "Selling Outrage" Deborah Chasman interviews our old friend Yochai Benkler. This interview begins with his diagnosis of the roots of these problems.  About halfway through, the conversation turns to the question of what to do: Benkler's focus is on how to improve journalistic practices to make it harder for misinformation and propaganda to spread. 

5. Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen tries to sort it out: https://bostonreview.net/articles/polarization-or-propaganda/

6. "Understanding Social Media Algorithms" by Arvind Narayanan. A deep dive into the history and nature of the kind of recomendation algoriths found on social media platforms and some anlysis of their effects. If you have time for only part of this article, read at least the sections called "Three Types of Information Propagation", "The Core of the Algorithm is Engagement Prediction", "How Engagement Optimization Fails Users, Creators, and Society", "Algorithms Are not the Enemy", and "Concluding Thoughts".

[Optional extra stuff: If you want to dive even deeper into the literature on this question, the references in Narayana's article provide a good start, and here is a roundup of papers and studies put together by Joanna Bryson, a professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.]

1. Quinn, Chapter 6, "Privacy and the Government";

2. Privacy scholar Daniel Solove takes on the claim that people with “nothing to hide” need not worry about government surveillance and data-aggregation:
https://teachprivacy.com/the-nothing-to-hide-argument-my-essays-10th-anniversary/

3. 3. Solove answers some other pro-surveillance arguments:
https://www.salon.com/2011/05/31/solove_privacy_security/

4. Oxford University philosopher Carisa Veliz links privacy to democracy::
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/why-democracy-needs-privacy/

Intellectual Property

1.   Quinn, Chapter 4 "Intellectual Property" -- If you have time and interest, read the whole chapter.  If not read at least:

a. Section 4.2 "Intellectual Property Rights" (pp. 167-173),

b. Section 4.3.4 "Copyrights" (pp. 176-179),

c. Section 4.4 "Fair Use" (pp. 184-191),

d. Sections 4.8 "Legitimacy of I.P. Protection for Software", 4.9 "Open-Source Software", and 4.10 "Creative Commons" (pp.208-217)

2. Richard Stallman, Misinterpreting Copyright—A Series of Errors

(You might also be interested in Stallman’s critique of the very concept of “Intellectual Property” – but this is optional.)

3. links to further (optional) materials on copyright from Yochai Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks - read some of this if you have time and interest.

1. Quinn, Chapter 10, “Work and Wealth”

2. Daron Acemoglu, “AI's Future Doesn't Have to Be Dystopian" (If you had time to read some of the replies to this essay that can be found at the top and bottom of the article, that would be great.)

Ethical issues with Artificial Intelligence

There’s a lot here to read, I know, but most of these pieces are short, some very short.

1. First, a Ted Talk by philosopher/futurist Nick Bostrom will serve as an introduction to the idea that we need to worry about the 'existential' threat of super-intelligent machines destroying humanity (sometimes calle "x-risk".
   https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_what_happens_when_our_computers_get_smarter_than_we_are/transcript
   
   
2. An overview of AI ethics issues in the form of a profile of Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist/ethicist who was fired from Google a couple of years ago. Gebru represents a shool of thought that find the 'x-risk' threat overblown and sees a need to pay more attention to the kinds of problems that current 'AI' is already producing.
   
   
3. Here’s what smart people were worrying about a few years ago (mostly discrimination built into algorithms)
   
   
4. The newer thing, A brief introduction to ChatGPT-type AI and its problems (from Wired magazine). 
   
   
5. Last spring  tech leaders called for a moratorium on further development of AI in an open letter signed by more than a thousand researchers and techies.
   
   
6. Some prominent advocates of “humane tech” also recently sounded the alarm.
   
   
7. And heres's a smart critique of the open letter from two Princeton University computer scientists
   
   
8. Ezra Klein of the New York Times says the problem is not the tech as much as it is the business models
   
   
9. This brief Twitter thread from a Daily Beast columnist describes concisely the kind of regulatory apparatus that I think we need to put in place to govern our digital world.
   
   The rest is optional extras:
   
   
10. [Optional!!!] Here's the best run-down I've seen of what led up to last week's startling events at OpenAI: Inside the Chaos at OpenAI
    
    
11. [Optional!!!] AI and IP: Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem
    
    
12. [Optional!!!]  If you want an understandable but much more detailed explanation of how tools like ChatGPT work, here’s one from physicist/computer scientist Stephen Wolfram.  AKA: more than you ever wanted to know about how these things actually work.
    
    
13. [Optional!!!]  An overview of the Biden administration's recent AI executive order
    
    
14. [Optional!!!] A Vox 'explainer' about the order and its weaknesses.
    
    
15. [Optional!!!] Want a more detailed discussion of Bostrom's ideas?
    a. Here's a review of his book Superintelligence
    https://reason.com/2014/09/12/will-superintelligent-machines-destroy-h/
    b. and here's an academic paper offering an approach to thinking about how to ensure that general AI is 'friendly'. https://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/aipolicy.pdf

1. Software designer Tobias van Schneider on design ethics:  "The Art of Being a Hypocrite Designer"
   
   
2. Salkever and Wadwa. "How Design Can Make Tech Products Less Addictive" (Don't neglect to click the button labeled "Story continues" to get the second half of the article.)
   
   
3. Check out the website of Tristan Harris' Center for Humane Technology. Start here:
   a. Key issues
   b. Then check out this page: Solutions Overview
   c. and this one: Policy Principles
   (This page has numerous headers that expand into more detailed explanations and examples when you click on them.) There's a lot more on the site, if you want to look further.