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.

 

1. Quinn, Chapter 2, the first six sections, stop when you get to the end of the section on Kantianism (p.72); Available in D2L
 
2. Excerpts from Kant (with notes);

1. Quinn, Chapter 9, the rest (i.e., section 9.6 on whistleblowing); Available in D2L.
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. Nat Eliason, The Destructive Switch from Search to Social

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, finding that it could alter their moods by altering their feeds.)

3. “Tinder, Hinge ‘deliberately’ turn users into swiping addicts, lawsuit says” https://wapo.st/3U6PZ63

4. Cory Doctorow, in his inimitable style, offers an explanation of why things have gone wrong, and a word to sum it up: Tiktok's enshittification (21 Jan 2023) (This article got a lot of attention and the word became the "word of the year" according to the American Dialect Association.)

6. Optional: Andrew Sullivan on Internet addiction: I Used To Be a Human Being (I'm putting this last and making it optional, 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.)

7. Optional: TikTok has allegedly gotten a lot of kids hooked on nicotine pouches: Our Kids Are Living in a Different Digital World

8. Also Optional: There's a feature length documentary film called the "The Social Dilemma", available on Netflix, that explores many of the issues we will be discussing this week.

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 in October, 2021, 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 (If you are pressed for time, read just the first few paragraphs of this story.)

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/

On the other hand:

6. An opinion piece from the Guardian newspaper last March: "Congress is right to want to curtail TikTok's power and influence" by Nita Farahany

Optional extra stuff:

"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 anlaysis of their effects. If you are interested, but have time for only part of this article, I would prioritize 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".

If you want to dive even deeper into the literature on this question, the references in Narayanan'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. I think these materials from the Markula Center for Applied Ethics will provide a pretty good overview of the nature and value of privacy:

a. "Defining Privacy" by Irina Raicu

b. "Why We Care About Privacy" by Michael McFarland, S.J.

c. "Loss of Online Privacy: What's the Harm?"

d. video on "The Right to be Forgotten"

2. MSNBC article on privacy law

1. A brief selection from Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, Chapter 6 (available in the class D2L site)

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://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/CHRON_HE/C110515S.pdf

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, Ethics for the Information Age, Chapter 4 -- first three sections [in D2L]

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

3.Benkler, Wealth of Networks, Introduction to Chapter 2 (pp. 35-41) [Stop when you get to the heading  "The Diversity of Strategies in our Current Information Production System"]

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

1. Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, Chapter 10 [in D2L]

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 called "x-risk").
   https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_what_happens_when_our_computers_get_smarter_than_we_are/transcript
   
   
2. And here's a review of his book Superintelligence
   
   
3. 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 school 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.
   
   
4. Here’s what smart people were worrying about a few years ago (mostly discrimination built into algorithms)
   
   
5. The newer thing, A brief introduction to ChatGPT-type AI and its problems (from Wired magazine). 
   
   
6. Child's suicide blamed on AI chatbot
   
   
7. Microsoft buys a power plant, the ever-growing power demand in tech:  
   
   
8. Ezra Klein of the New York Times says the problem is not the tech, it's the business models
   
   
9. This brief Twitter thread from a Daily Beast columnist describes concisely the kind of regulatory apparatus that I (Tom) think we need to put in place to govern our digital world.
   
   
10. Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem
    
    The rest is optional extras:
    
    
    
11. [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.
    
    
    
12. [Optional!!!] 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.