Social Implications of Computer Technology
CS 195, Spring 2023
Topics, Readings, and Assignments
| Date | Lecture | Topic | Slides | Readings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01/17 | 01 | Free Speech | link | jump |
| 01/24 | 02 | Social Connection and Time Well-Spent | link | jump |
| 01/31 | 03 | Privacy | link | jump |
| 02/07 | 04 | Software Risks | link | jump |
| 02/14 | 05 | Capitalism and Silicon Valley | link | jump |
| 02/21 | 06 | Memes and Viral Content | link | jump |
| 02/28 | 07 | Government Censorship and Surveillance | link | jump |
| 03/07 | 08 | Algorithmic Bias and Fairness | link | jump |
| 03/14 | 09 | Jobs, Automation, and Labor | link | jump |
| 03/21 | 10 | Education (canceled) | link | jump |
| 03/28 | – | Spring break: No Class! | link | jump |
| 04/04 | 11 | Guest Speaker: Jay Chen, Ontological Remapping for an Age of Atomization | link | jump |
| 04/11 | 12 | Guest Speaker: Michael Ball, Generative AI | link | jump |
| 04/18 | 13 | Guest Speaker: Josh Hug, Web 3.0, Bitcoin, and Storytelling | link | jump |
| 04/25 | 14 | Guest Speaker: Khalid Kadir, Whose Cities? The Political Economy of Someone Else’s Smart Cities | link | jump |
Readings #
Readings are “required”, “recommended”, or “extra”. Required readings should be done before class for the discussion to make sense. Recommended readings will be used as sources in lecture, but we won’t assume you’ve read them.
More information about the assignments, including the essays, can be found on the Assignments page in the sidebar.
04/25 Lecture 14: Guest Speaker: Khalid Kadir, Whose Cities? The Political Economy of Someone Else’s Smart Cities #
Slides: link
Guest speaker: Dr. Khalid Kadir, Lecturer in Global Poverty and Practice, Political Economy, Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. profile
Fill out this survey by Monday 04/24 at 11:59 PM.
Abstract: We all want the future to be better than the present, and many of us would like to be a part of making that happen. However, sometimes in our attempts to build that better future we lose sight of who that future is for and what is being lost with the changes we so quickly usher in. Embedded in our projects to program the cities of the future, “smart” cities, are technologies that have deep implications for wealth and its distribution, as well as power and its concentration. In this lecture, we’ll discuss some of the values that are built into smart cities through the application of machine learning technologies, and consider for whom we are building these cities. Building more inclusive, democratic cities will require us to recenter our work around socio-political, not technical, questions. Such an undertaking will pose epistemological challenges to the engineering status-quo. Moreover, it will require us to face institutional and personal challenges as well, as we will have to confront our own positions of power and privilege in society. This process, however, is essential if we are serious about contributing to a more just, equitable future.
- Required: Ensmenger, N. (2021). The Cloud Is a Factory. In T. S. Mullaney, B. Peters, M. Hicks, & K. Philip (Eds.), Your Computer Is on Fire (pp. 29–49). The MIT Press.
04/18 Lecture 13: Guest Speaker: Josh Hug, Web 3.0, Bitcoin, and Storytelling #
Slides: link
Guest speaker: Josh Hug, Associate Teaching Professor in EECS.
Fill out this survey by Monday 04/17 at 11:59 PM.
- Required: Simply Explained, Bitcoin Lightning Network
- Required: NY Times, The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin
- Recommended: Coindesk, The New York Times’ Skewed Bitcoin Mining Exposé Reveals Blatant Bias
- Recommended: Simply Explained, Proof-of-Stake
- Extra: Wired, The 10,000 Faces That Launched an NFT Revolution
04/11 Lecture 12: Guest Speaker: Michael Ball, Generative AI #
Slides: link
Guest speaker: Michael Ball, Lecturer in EECS.
Fill out this survey by Monday 04/10 at 11:59 PM.
- Required: Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and
Shmargaret Shmitchell. 2021. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language
Models Be Too Big? 🦜. In Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
(FAccT ’21), March 3–10, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada. ACM, New
York, NY, USA, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
- Alternative video version of the paper: https://www.turing.ac.uk/events/dangers-stochastic-parrots
- Required: From Bing to Sydney
- Recommended: Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter
04/04 Lecture 11: Guest Speaker: Jay Chen, Ontological Remapping for an Age of Atomization #
Slides: link
Guest speaker: Dr. Jay Chen, Senior Researcher at ICSI. profile
Fill out this survey by Monday 04/03 at 11:59 PM.
- Required: Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M. (1973). “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4. Elsevier.
- Recommended: Winner, L. (1980). “Do artifacts have politics?” Daedalus, 121-136.
03/21 Lecture 10: Education (canceled) #
Lecture has been canceled due to the EECS Faculty Retreat. The survey is still required. See this Ed post.
Fill out this survey by Monday 03/20 at 11:59 PM.
- Recommended: Smith, “The Machines Are Learning, and So Are the Students”
- Recommended: Upson, “How an Epic Series of Tech Errors Hobbled Miami’s Schools”
- Recommended: bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 1994. Engaged Pedagogy, p. 13 - p. 22
- Access through your institution
- Extra: Reich “Ed-Tech Mania Is Back”, requires registering free chronicle.com account.
- Extra: Carey, “An Online Education Breakthrough? A Master’s Degree for a Mere $7,000”
- Extra: Khan, “I Started Khan Academy. We Can Still Avoid an Education Catastrophe.”
03/14 Lecture 09: Jobs, Automation, and Labor #
Slides: link
Fill out this survey by Monday 03/13 at 11:59 PM.
- Required: UAW 2865 & SRU Contract Highlights
- Required: Zaveri, Paayal, “The tech layoffs have created the perfect moment for tech workers to get organized and unionize, but getting there isn’t easy”
- Required: McKinsey Global Institute, “Harnessing automation for a future that works”
- Recommended: Kim, Tammy, “The Gig Economy is Coming for Your Job”
- Extra: Chokshi, “What if You Had a Four-Day Week? Why Don’t You?”
- Extra: Boudette, “Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’”
- Extra: Realtime Inequality
03/07 Lecture 08: Algorithmic Bias and Fairness #
Slides: link
Fill out this survey by Monday 03/06 at 11:59 PM.
- Required: Washington Post, “A computer program used for bail and sentencing decisions was labeled biased against blacks. It’s actually not that clear.”, 2016.
- Copied to EdStem: https://edstem.org/us/courses/35154/discussion/2715737
- Required: The New York Times. “Make Algorithms Accountable”, 2016.
- Recommended: Tufekci, Zeynep, “Machine intelligence makes human morals more important” (video)
- Optional: Google Research, “Attacking discrimination with smarter machine learning”
02/28 Lecture 07: Government Censorship and Surveillance #
Slides: link
Fill out this survey by Monday 02/27 at 11:59 PM.
- Required: NPR. Surveillance And Local Police: How Technology Is Evolving Faster Than Regulation, 2021.
- Required: BBC News “Microsoft says error caused ‘Tank Man’ Bing censorship”, 2021.
- Recommended: FreedomHouse, “Countering an Authoritarian Overhaul of the Internet”, 2022.
- Skim Key Findings and Introduction; stop before Tracking the Global Decline
- Extra: Kayyali, “FBI’s “Suicide Letter” to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance”, 2014.
- Extra: Google Blog. “A new approach to China”, 2010.
- Extra: 1A podcast. “Know It All: AI and Police Surveillance”, 2023. Click on “Trancsript” to expand transcript as needed.
02/21 Lecture 06: Memes and Viral Content #
Slides: link
Fill out this survey by Monday 02/20 at 11:59 PM.
- Recommended: The New Yorker, “Ivermectin, the Crate Challenge, and the Danger of Runaway Memes”, 2021.
- Recommended: The New Yorker, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds”, 2017. (trigger warning: suicide)
- Extra: CGP Gray, YouTube, “This Video Will Make You Angry”
- Extra: Heath, Bell, Sternberg, 2001. “Emotional selection in memes: the case of urban legends” (requires Berkeley VPN)
- Extra: Shullenberger, 2016. “Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection” (very weird/questionable read, but interesting)
02/14 Lecture 05: Capitalism and Silicon Valley #
Slides: link
Fill out this survey by Monday 02/13 at 11:59 PM.
- Required: Wu, “Optimize What?”, 2019.
- Required: Montojo, “Understanding Rising Inequality and Displacement in Oakland”, 2017.
- Required: Turner, “Don’t Be Evil: Fred Turner on Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers”, 2017.
- Optional: Nguyen, “Full report: Silicon Valley Pain Index 2022”, 2022.
02/07 Lecture 04: Software Risks #
Slides: link
Fill out this survey by Monday 02/06 at 11:59 PM.
Readings:
- Required: Fabio, “Killed by a Machine: The Therac-25”
- Required: Peter G. Neumann, “A Holistic View of Future Risks”, 2020. Inside Risks.
- Recommended: Travis, “How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer”
- Optional: Branam, “Learning from Engineering Failures”
01/31 Lecture 03: Privacy #
Slides: link
Please fill out Weekly Survey 03 by Monday 1/30 at 11:59 PM.
Readings:
- Required: Theilman, “Apple v the FBI: what’s the beef, how did we get here and what’s at stake?”, 2016. The Guardian.
- Required: Newman, “Apple Kills Its Plan to Scan Your Photos for CSAM. Here’s What’s Next”, 2022. Wired. (references child abuse).
- Recommended Follow Up: Clark, “Here’s how the FBI managed to get into the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone”, 2021. The Verge.
- Recommended: MacMillan, Anderson, “Student tracking, secret scores: How college admissions offices rank prospects before they apply”, 2019. Washington Post.
- Extra 1: Rachels, “Why Privacy Is Important”, 1975. JSTOR.
- Extra 2: Hill, “A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal.”, 2022. New York Times. (references child abuse).
01/24 Lecture 02: Social Connection and Time Well-Spent #
Slides: link
Please fill out the Weekly Survey 02 by Monday 01/23 11:59pm PT.
Readings:
- Required: Pew Research Center, “Social Media Use in 2021”
- Recommended 1: New York Times Opinion, “This Is Our Chance to Pull Teenagers Out of the Smartphone Trap”
- Recommended 2: BBC, “The people deciding to ditch their smartphones”
- Recommended 3: NPR, “New Research Casts Doubt On Connection Between Smartphone Use And Teen Mental Health”
- Extra 1: “How TikTok Holds Our Attention”
- Extra 2: “Tristan Harris: How better tech could protect us from distraction”
- Extra: “Lil B - The Age Of Information MUSIC VIDEO DIRECTED BY LIL B”
01/17 Lecture 01: Free Speech #
Slides: link
Survey: Please fill out the welcome form by Friday 1/20 11:59pm PT. Attendance: No lecture attendance will be taken for this lecture, though relevant content will be covered.
Optional readings:
- Motherboard Tech by Vice. The History of Twitter’s Rules, 2016.
- The New Yorker. “Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court”, 2021.
- United Nations. Hate speech versus freedom of speech.
- TIME. What Is #GamerGate and Why Are Women Being Threatened About Video Games?. 2014.
- Wikipedia. Gamergate.
- Electronic Frontier Foundation. Section 230: Key Legal Cases.