Schedule and readings

This course will have weekly readings covering a variety of topics. These will be from the academic literature and from the popular press. Some also include short videos. Every week, there will also be a "from the news" reading, responding to very recent current events.

Several of the articles in this course are not freely available due to paywalls. In the table below, you will find both direct links to the articles on the websites of their publishers, and (in many cases) links to licensed versions of the articles, which will often require you to log in with your UW credentials to either your account on UW Learn or the UW Library. It's worth noting that "fair dealing", which allows us to teach from copyrighted materials, can run into licenses that the university signs with publishers and other owners of copyright: this is, indeed, a social implication of computing.

Please come to class prepared to discuss the week's readings. Each week there will also be a writing assignment, shown on the weekly assignments pane, for which students must write a 500-1000 word paper, due at 11:59 PM on the Thursday night before our Friday lectures.

For example, before the first lecture, on Friday, September 9, please read the articles below on surveillance and anonymity; at that class, we will give the prompt for that week's writing assignment, which is due on September 15.

#	Date	Topics	Readings	"From the News" reading	Writing assignment
1	9 Sept	Surveillance and anonymity	Surveillance Capitalism: An Interview with Shoshana Zuboff: article Talk by Prof. Zuboff: YouTube link Surveillance in the classroom: WIRED article: link, non-paywalled link Proctoring software and security risks: article Surveillance of LGBT people: the case of Msgr. Burrrill: article, non-paywalled link Surveillance and abortion access: article Smart doorbells and surveillance: article #1, article #2 "Real-name" policies and their concerns: article #1, article #2	none	Assignment 1, due 15 September
2	16 Sept	Political radicalization and conspiracy theories	Buffalo shooter and his manifesto: article #1 (non-paywalled link), article #2 COVID conspiracy theories: article How to stop online conspiracy theories?: article #1, article #2 Terrorism recruitment and social networking: article	Radiolab podcast OR (Nature Machine Intelligence article AND Scientific American article)	Assignment 2, due 22 September
3	23 Sept	Democratic impacts of online discourse	Online anonymity and Tor: article Doxxing and deradicalization: article, non-paywalled link Nihilism and the Internet: article Techno-libertarianism: article (Note! Medium has a metered paywall; you may need help to download this and not hit the paywall.) Is this new at all? Political participation was already poor in the '90s: Bowling Alone, chapter 2	NYTimes article	Assignment 3, due 29 September
4	30 Sept	AI creativity and co-creativity	Neural image-generation systems: article Copyright of generated art: article Copyright and ownership of training data: Canada, US (don't read the whole article!) Impact on creative people's work: article Can computers even create? Yes! No!	article	Assignment 4, due 6 October
5	7 Oct	Mental health and harassment effects	Are smartphones bad for mental health? yes! (non-paywalled link) We don't know! What about for sex? article, non-paywalled link Can computers help with mental health? article online socilization during COVID: article #1 (non-paywalled link), article #2 LGBTQ university students and online community: article Furries: article	article (and the one it's about: article)	Assignment 5, due 20 October
Reading week Oct 14
6	21 Oct	Sex and love with robots	Robot nannies: article, non-paywalled link Sex with robots: consent: article, non-paywalled version Sex with robots: yes! video Sex with robots: no! video Custom AI-generated porn: article Somewhat unrelated: why are all intelligent agents female by default? article	article	Assignment 6, due 27 October
7	28 Oct	Self-driving cars and the decline of work	Whose autonomy is at risk? LGBTQ truckers, among others. Semi Queer, conclusion chapter library link, .pdf link Ethical questions about self-driving cars: article Gig economy and unionization efforts: chapter from Mike Monteiro's Ruined by Design Unions at big tech: article Natural monopolies in tech: do they matter? No! (non-paywalled link). Yes! and it's going to be hard to fix Yes! and we've got to fix it	article	Assignment 7, due 3 November
8	4 Nov	Computers and warfare	History: Turing and WWII: article History: computing research at nuclear weapons labs and "fun" at the height of the Cold War: article Drone warfare: article (non-paywalled link) Open-source intelligence: article Facial recognition of fallen soldiers: article Autonomous killer robots: website, article	article	Assignment 8, due 10 November
9	11 Nov	Recommendation systems and serendipity	"Rise of the algorithm" in fashion: article (non-paywalled version) Loss of enthusiasm for new music: interview Music discovery interfaces: article What does "diversity" mean for music listeners? article Who deserves to be paid? And how? article	blog post	Assignment 9, due 17 November
10	18 Nov	Impacts on disability from the online life	A day in the life of two disabled people: article (non-paywalled version) Competing access needs: newsletter Online education and disabled people: article Neurodiverse people and tech jobs: article Alt-tags and accessible content: article (via NYT lesson plan link)	TBD	Assignment 10, due 24 November
11	25 Nov	Effects of the rise of computing on countries outside the developed world	Resource mining: article Facial recognition data sets: article (non-paywalled link) AI and opportunity: article (non-paywalled link) Payments in Kenya: article (or follow this link and then do what is in this video)	article	Assignment 11, due 1 December
12	2 Dec	Wrap up and student projects, AI for good	N/A	article #1, article #2	N/A