Part 1: What Next for Tech Ethics? A New Course

(Part 1 (Intro) to the University of Hertfordshire Tech Ethics Course. Part 2 >>)

In 2018, a group of keen techies ran a conference on technical ethics in London. The first spin-off from that event was the sustainable servers 2024 petition. We are now happy to announce the next. In 2020, we will be combining academic and industrial work on tech ethics to create practical resources to help developers make more informed choices about what to build; how to build it; and how to operate it safely for users and non-users alike (aka the rest of society).

We’ll be writing and delivering an open source “Responsible Technology” module for the University of Hertfordshire’s Computer Science MSc. The project is supported by the University and sponsored by Container Solutions.

What’s Coming?

We’re searching for the best work out there on practical tech ethics for the course and we'll build an open source repo of all our written and gathered materials.

We’ll also publish a series of blog posts on:

• What is tech ethics and why is it a big deal?
• “The law’s the floor.” But what’s legal and what’s not?
• What does society want? How to keep your eye on current and up-and-coming priorities: the climate and ecosystem, privacy, fairness, equality, and health.
• What’s out there to help? Resources from industry and academia.
• The psychology of responsibility. Why do people do bad things? (Including Milgram, Asch, psychological safety, and whether codes of ethics really work).
• Testing, monitoring and reporting.
• Deeper dives into areas like: energy use, AI, Big Data, data bias, cyberwarfare, and the digital Geneva convention.
• The history of accessibility and the UI, which is a fascinating example of an ethical success story that stopped working.

In the first blog post in the series, we'll look at why "the law's the floor".

(Part 1 (Intro) to the University of Hertfordshire Tech Ethics Course. Part 2 >>)

About the Author

Anne Currie is tech greybeard (ahem) who has been in the sector as an engineer, writer and speaker for 25 years. She runs & helps organise conferences in hard tech and in ethics, is a visiting lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and most importantly of all, is the author of the dystopian, hard scifi Panopticon series (Amazon US, Amazon UK). Contact her on Twitter @anne_e_currie or at www.annecurrie.com. 

Sponsored by Container Solutions