Assignments
All weekly assignments must be done individually. If you wish to use material from either the course readings or readings you find yourself, please make sure to cite properly.
Each week, there will be an assigned topic for that week's writing; these will also appear in the course Slack page. Your submissions will be due to the LEARN dropbox for the course by 11:59 on the Thursdays before the Friday class meetings. Students must complete six of these essays in the term; see the grading pane for more details.
Late essays will not be accepted except under extreme circumstances; please contact the instructor in those situations. Otherwise, please just respond to the next submission prompt.
| # | Due Date | Subject | Prompt |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 15 Sept | Surveillance and anonymity | Read the paper on test proctoring software that is in the Week 1 readings. Suppose you were the IT manager at a group that was administering a licensing test like the ones described in this paper. What would you advise your bosses to do to ensure that the concerns in the paper were being taken seriously? Which, if any, of the concerns would you not worry about? |
| 2 | 22 Sept | Political radicalization and conspiracy theories | To what extend do online fora like social media sites bear a responsibility for societal extremism? What is a reasonable response to the overall situation by society as a whole? |
| 3 | 29 Sept | Democratic impacts of online discourse | Is it the case that democratic engagement can improved via social media tools? What would need to happen for this to be the case? |
| 4 | 6 Oct | AI creativity and co-creativity | Suppose that someone uses a prompt-based visual machine-learning system (like Midjourney) to generate an image, and the resultant image is problematic in some way. (Example forms of “problematic”: it portrays a celebrity doing something criminal, it is unsuitable for minors, it’s appallingly violent, it reveals trade secrets, it violates trademarks, it appropriates Indigenous knowledge.) For one example of “problematic”, describe the way in which the hypothetical image is problematic, and describe who should be responsible for the problematic image and what form (if any) that responsibility should take. How does this “problematic” case connect to the broader question of ownership of AI-generated images? |
| 5 | 20 Oct | Mental health and harassment effects | Can mental health chatbots like WoeBot be a useful way to help people who are experiencing serious mental health difficulty? Describe an experiment that could help you answer this question. Would performing this experiment be ethical? |
| 6 | 27 Oct | Sex and love with robots | What is the limit of appropriate technology for sex robots, and why? How should societies enforce this limit? |
| 7 | 3 Nov | Self-driving cars and the decline of work | Automation has come to a number of professions over the past 125 years, ranging from farmers to telephone operators to manufacturing workers. How will the development of AI models that potentially automate professions like design, coding and writing change what people in those professions do in their jobs? |
| 8 | 10 Nov | Computers and warfare | Does the existence of drone warfare controlled from afar make the targeting of civilians in countries employing drone warfare morally less problematic? Why or why not? |
| 9 | 17 Nov | Recommendation systems and serendipity | What kind of feature could cause people to find cultural materials (art / music / movies / literature) outside their ordinary range of experiences. Describe one such feature, and give positive and negative aspects of it. |
| 10 | 24 Nov | Impacts on disability from the online life | Identify one inaccessibility in a commonly used piece of tech (an app, a device, …). What would you do to fix it? Would your proposed fix worsen the situation for a different category of users? If so, what would you do about this situation? |
| 11 | 1 Dec | Effects of the rise of computing on countries outside the developed world | Choose 1 of:
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