research-article

More Than "If Time Allows": The Role of Ethics in AI Education

Authors: Natalie Garrett, Nathan Beard, Casey FieslerAuthors Info & Claims

AIES '20: Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

Pages 272 - 278

https://doi.org/10.1145/3375627.3375868

Published: 07 February 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Even as public pressure mounts for technology companies to consider societal impacts of products, industries and governments in the AI race are demanding technical talent. To meet this demand, universities clamor to add technical artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) courses into computing curriculum-but how are societal and ethical considerations part of this landscape? We explore two pathways for ethics content in AI education: (1) standalone AI ethics courses, and (2) integrating ethics into technical AI courses. For both pathways, we ask: What is being taught? As we train computer scientists who will build and deploy AI tools, how are we training them to consider the consequences of their work? In this exploratory work, we qualitatively analyzed 31 standalone AI ethics classes from 22 U.S. universities and 20 AI/ML technical courses from 12 U.S. universities to understand which ethics-related topics instructors include in courses. We identify and categorize topics in AI ethics education, share notable practices, and note omissions. Our analysis will help AI educators identify what topics should be taught and create scaffolding for developing future AI ethics education.

References

[1]

Safinah Arshad Ali, Blakeley H. Payne, Randi Williams, Hae Won Park, and Cynthia Breazeal. (2019) Constructionism, Ethics, and Creativity: Developing Primary and Middle School Artificial Intelligence Education. Presented in the International Workshop on Education in Artificiation Intelligence K-12 (EDUAI '19). Palo Alto, CA, USA. Proceedings of IJCAI 2019.

[2]

Anna Maria Barry-Jester, Ben Casselman, and Dana Goldstein. 2018. Should Prison Sentences Be Based On Crimes That Haven't Been Committed Yet? FiveThirtyEight. (2018) https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/prison-reform-risk-assessment/

[3]

Brett A. Becker and Thomas Fitzpatrick. 2019. What Do CS1 Syllabi Reveal About Our Expectations of Introductory Programming Students?. In Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1011--1017.

Digital Library

[4]

Ian Bogost. 2017. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Debate Artificial Intelligence. The Atlantic. (2017) https://perma.cc/RK6C-S7Z2.

[5]

boyd, danah. 2019. Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On. Apophenia. (2019) https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2019/09/15/facing-the-great-reckoning-head-on.html.

[6]

Burton, Emanuelle, Judy Goldsmith and Nicholas Mattei. 2015. Teaching AI ethics using science fiction. AAAI Workshop - Technical Report (2015), 33--37.

[7]

Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison. 2018. Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach. The Guardian. (2018) https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election

[8]

Felicia Chong. 2016. The Pedagogy of Usability: An Analysis of Technical Communication Textbooks, Anthologies, and Course Syllabi and Descriptions. Technical Communication Quarterly. 25, 1 (Jan. 2016), 12--28.

[9]

Kate Conger, Richard Fausset and Serge F. Kovaleski. 2019. San Francisco Bans Facial Recognition Technology. The New York Times. (2019) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/facial-recognition-ban-san-francisco.html

[10]

Eric Eaton, Sven Koenig, Claudia Schulz, Francesco Maurelli, John Lee, Joshua Eckroth, Mark Crowley, Richard G. Freedman, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, Tiago Machado, and Tom Williams. 2018. Blue sky ideas in artificial intelligence education from the EAAI 2017 new and future AI educator program. AI Matters. 3, 4 (Feb. 2018), 23--31.

Digital Library

[11]

Casey Fiesler, Natalie Garrett, and Nathan Beard. 2020. What Do We Teach When We Teach Tech Ethics?: A Syllabi Analysis. SIGCSE Conference on Computer Science Education. (2020).

Digital Library

[12]

Casey Fiesler, and Blake Hallinan. 2018. "We Are the Product": Public Reactions to Online Data Sharing and Privacy Controversies in the Media. CHI '18 Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2018), 1--13.

Digital Library

[13]

Daniel Greene, Anna Lauren Hoffmann, and Luke Stark. 2019. Better, Nicer, Clearer, Fairer: A Critical Assessment of the Movement for Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2019), 10.

[14]

Larry Greenemeier. 2018. Can AI Really Solve Facebook's Problems? Scientific American. (2018) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-ai-really-solve-facebooks-problems1/

[15]

Barbara J. Grosz, David Gray Grant, Kate Vredenburgh, Jeff Behrends, Lily Hu, Alison Simmons, and Jim Waldo. 2019. Embedded EthiCS: Integrating Ethics Broadly Across Computer Science Education. Commun. ACM 62, 8 (2019), 54--61.

Digital Library

[16]

Loren Grushe. 2015. Google engineer apologizes after Photos app tags two black people as gorillas. The Verge. (2015) https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/1/8880363/google-apologizes-photos-app-tags-two-black-people-gorillas.

[17]

Thilo Hagendorff. 2019. The Ethics of AI Ethics -- An Evaluation of Guidelines. (Feb. 2019). https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.03425

[18]

Yuval Noah Harari. 2017. The Meaning of Life in a World Without Work. The Guardian. (2017) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book

[19]

Ali Haskins Lisle, Coleman Merenda, and Joseph Gabbard. 2019. Using affinity diagramming to generate a codebook: a case study on young military veterans and community reintegration. Qualitative Research (2019), 1--18.

[20]

Nathan Heller. 2016. If animals have rights, should robots? The New Yorker. (2016), 1--14. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/if-animals-have-rights-should-robots.

[21]

Kashmir Hill. 2017. Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won't Tell Me How. Gizmodo. (2017). https://perma.cc/NKG3-L8QL.

[22]

Dan Hurley. 2018. Can an algorithm tell when kids are in danger? The New York Times Magazine. (2018) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/magazine/can-an-algorithm-tell-when-kids-are-in-danger.html

[23]

Ben Hutchinson, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Emily Denton, Kellie Webster, Yu Zhong, and Stephen Denuyl. 2019. Unintended Machine Learning Biases as Social Barriers for Persons with Disabilities. ACCESS. Issue 125, (2019).

[24]

Heather Knight. 2014. How Humans Respond to Robots?: Building Public Policy through Good Design. https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-humans-respond-to-robots-building-public-policy-through-good-design/

[25]

Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, Lauren Kirchner and Julia Angwin. 2016. How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm. ProPublica. (2016) https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm

[26]

Kristie J Loescher, Regina W Hughes, Frank Cavico, Jim Mirabella, and Pedro F Pellet. 2005. The Impact of an "Ethics Across the Curriculum" Initiative on the Cognitive Moral Development of Business School Undergraduates. Teaching Ethics (2005), 31--72.

[27]

Kathleen M. MacQueen, Eleanor McLellan, Kelly Kay, and Bobby Milstein. 1998. Codebook Development for Team-Based Qualitative Analysis. Field Methods 10, 2 (1998), 31--36.

[28]

C. Dianne Martin, Chuck Huff, Donald Gotterbarn, and Keith Miller. 1996. Implementing a Tenth Strand in the CS Curriculum. Commun. ACM 39, 12 (1996), 75--84.

Digital Library

[29]

Alice Marwick. 2014. How your data are being deeply mined. New York Review of Books. 61, 1 (2014).

[30]

Nick Merrill. 2017. Better not to know? The SHA1 collision & the limits of polemic computation. LIMITS 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Computing Within Limits (Jun. 2017), 37--42.

Digital Library

[31]

Brent Mittelstadt. 2019. Principles Alone Cannot Guarantee Ethical AI. Nature Machine Intelligence. 1, (2019), 501--507.

[32]

Moral Machine: 2017. http://moralmachine.mit.edu/. Accessed: 2019--11-04.

[33]

Evgeny Morozov. 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. Allen Lane.

[34]

Heather Murphy. 2017. Why Stanford Researchers Tried to Create a 'Gaydar' Machine. The New York Times. (2017) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/science/stanford-sexual-orientation-study.html

[35]

Dom Nicastro. 2019. How Are Universities Responding to the Tech Skills Gap? CMS Wire2. (2019). https://www.cmswire.com/digital-workplace/how-are-universities-responding-to-the-tech-skills-gap/

[36]

Safiya Noble. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press.

[37]

Don Peck. 2013. They're Watching You at Work. The Atlantic. (2013), 72--84. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/

[38]

David Rotman. 2017. "The Relentless Pace of Automation". MIT Technology Review. (2017) https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603465/the-relentless-pace-of-automation/.

[39]

Dominic Rushe. 2017. End of the road: will automation put an end to the American trucker? The Guardian. (2017) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/10/american-trucker-automation-jobs.

[40]

Jeffrey Saltz, Michael Skirpan, Casey Fiesler, Micha Gorelick, Tom Yeh, Robert Heckman, Neil Dewar, and Nathan Beard. 2019. Integrating Ethics within Machine-learning Courses. ACM Transactions on Computing Education 19, 4 (2019), 1--26.

Digital Library

[41]

Andrew D Selbst, danah boyd, Sorelle A Friedler, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, and Janet Vertesi. 2019. Fairness and abstraction in sociotechnical systems. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (2019), 59--68.

Digital Library

[42]

Aarti Shahani. 2019. Congress' Power Struggle With Big Tech Will Be On Display At Hearings?. NPR. (2019) https://www.npr.org/2019/07/16/742109310/congress-power-struggle-with-big-tech-will-be-on-display-at-hearings

[43]

Katie Shilton. 2018. Engaging Values Despite Neutrality: Challenges and Approaches to Values Reflection during the Design of Internet Infrastructure. Science, Technology, & Human Values. 43, 2 (2018), 247--269.

[44]

Natasha Singer, N. 2018. Tech's ethical "dark side": Harvard, Stanford, and others want to address it. The New York Times. (2018) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/business/computer-science-ethics-courses.htm.

[45]

Carol Spradling, Leen-Kiat Soh, and Charles Ansorge. 2008. Ethics Training and Decision-making: Do Computer Science Programs Need Help? Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (New York, NY, USA, 2008), 153--157.

Digital Library

[46]

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018: 2018. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#ethics. Accessed: 2019--11-04.

[47]

Bernd Carsten Stahl, Job Timmermans, and Brent Daniel Mittelstadt. 2016. The Ethics of Computing: A Survey of the Computing-Oriented Literature. ACM Comput. Surv. 48, 4 (Feb. 2016), 55:1--55:38.

Digital Library

[48]

Luke Stark and Anna Lauren Hoffmann. 2019. Data Is the New What? Popular Metaphors & Professional Ethics in Emerging Data Culture. Journal of Cultural Analytics 127, 127 (2019), 1--22.

[49]

Zeynep Tufekci. 2014. Facebook and Engineering the Public. The Message. (2014) https://medium.com/message/engineering-the-public-289c91390225

[50]

Manas Tungare, Xiaoyan Yu, William Cameron, Guofang Teng, A P Manuel, Lillian Cassel,Weiguo Fan, and Edward A Fox. 2007. Towards a Syllabus Repository for Computer Science Courses Categories and Subject Descriptors. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Covington, KY, 55--59.

[51]

Siva Vaidhyanathan. 2019. Mark Zuckerberg Needs to Shut Up. Wired. (2019) https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-needs-to-shut-up/

[52]

Ben Wagner. 2019. Ethics as an Escape from Regulation. In Being Profiled. E. Bayamlio?lu et al., eds. 84--89.

[53]

Alison Wynn. 2019. Why Tech's Approach to Fixing Its Gender Inequality Isn't Working. Harvard Business Review. (2019) https://hbr.org/2019/10/why-techs-approach-to-fixing-its-gender-inequality-isnt-working

[54]

The Case against Killer Robots: 2012. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/11/19/losing-humanity/case-against-killer-robots.

Cited By

R. SP. S. D(2024)AI-Driven Flipped Classroom: Revolutionizing Education Through Digital PedagogyBritish Journal of Education, Learning and Development Psychology10.52589/BJELDP-LTDJFLIH7:2(169-179)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.52589/BJELDP-LTDJFLIH
Ghandour D(2024)Navigating the Impact of AI Integration in Higher EducationUtilizing AI for Assessment, Grading, and Feedback in Higher Education10.4018/979-8-3693-2145-4.ch009(212-233)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-2145-4.ch009
Khanna SGhosh FKumar S(2024)Successful Footprints of ChatGPT Deployments in the Education SectorRevolutionizing the Service Industry Wth OpenAI Models10.4018/979-8-3693-1239-1.ch009(219-242)Online publication date: 31-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-1239-1.ch009
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

More Than "If Time Allows": The Role of Ethics in AI Education
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education

Recommendations

AI for K-12: Making Room for AI in K-12 CS Curricula
SIGCSE '19: Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

As CS expands into more K-12 classrooms and children become familiar with computational thinking, advances in AI pose new challenges for CS educators. Children now enjoy conversing with AI-powered agents such as Alexa and Siri, while their parents worry ...
Centering Ethics in Computing Student's Mind: A Question Directed Approach for Teaching and Learning Tech Ethics
SIGCSE 2024: Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2

There continues to be growing interest in including ethics in undergraduate computer science and engineering education. While this impulse is greatly welcome, the subject of ethics and how it relates to the profession and professional practice can be ...
Ethics from the Start: Exploring Student Attitudes and Creating Interventions in Intro Programming Classes
SIGCSE '20: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

The role of ethics in computing is a topic gaining more interest in the SIGCSE community in recent years. Our work is motivated by the idea that there is benefit to integrating ethics throughout undergraduate CS curriculum from the start. Therefore, we ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

AIES '20: Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

February 2020

439 pages

ISBN:9781450371100

DOI:10.1145/3375627

General Chairs:
Annette Markham
Aarhus University | Loyola University
,
Julia Powles
University of Western Australia
,
Toby Walsh
TU Berlin | University of New South Wales | Data61
,
Anne L. Washington
New York University

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGAI: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 February 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Mozilla Responsible Computer Science Challenge

Conference

AIES '20

Sponsor:

SIGAI

AIES '20: AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

February 7 - 9, 2020

NY, New York, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 61 of 162 submissions, 38%

Upcoming Conference

AIES '24

Sponsor:
sigai

AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

October 21 - 23, 2024

San Jose , CA , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

70
Total Citations
View Citations
2,237
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)704
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)81

Reflects downloads up to 15 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

R. SP. S. D(2024)AI-Driven Flipped Classroom: Revolutionizing Education Through Digital PedagogyBritish Journal of Education, Learning and Development Psychology10.52589/BJELDP-LTDJFLIH7:2(169-179)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.52589/BJELDP-LTDJFLIH
Ghandour D(2024)Navigating the Impact of AI Integration in Higher EducationUtilizing AI for Assessment, Grading, and Feedback in Higher Education10.4018/979-8-3693-2145-4.ch009(212-233)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-2145-4.ch009
Khanna SGhosh FKumar S(2024)Successful Footprints of ChatGPT Deployments in the Education SectorRevolutionizing the Service Industry Wth OpenAI Models10.4018/979-8-3693-1239-1.ch009(219-242)Online publication date: 31-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-1239-1.ch009
Nithithanatchinnapat BMaurer JDeng XJoshi K(2024)Future Business Workforce: Crafting a Generative AI-Centric Curriculum Today for Tomorrow's Business EducationACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems10.1145/3645057.364505955:1(6-11)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3645057.3645059
Jantunen MMeyes RKurchyna VMeisen TAbrahamsson PMohanani R(2024)Researchers’ Concerns on Artificial Intelligence Ethics: Results from a Scenario-Based SurveyProceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Software-intensive Business10.1145/3643690.3648238(24-31)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643690.3648238
Darling-Wolf HPatitsas E(2024)"Not my Priority:" Ethics and the Boundaries of Computer Science Identities in Undergraduate CS EducationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36410138:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641013
Engelmann SChoksi MWang AFiesler C(2024)Visions of a Discipline: Analyzing Introductory AI Courses on YouTubeProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3630106.3659045(2400-2420)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630106.3659045
Madaio MKapania SQadri RWang DZaldivar ADenton RWilcox L(2024)Learning about Responsible AI On-The-Job: Learning Pathways, Orientations, and AspirationsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3630106.3658988(1544-1558)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630106.3658988
Zhou XZhou YGong YCai ZQiu AXiao QAntle ABai Z(2024)"Bee and I need diversity!" Break Filter Bubbles in Recommendation Systems through Embodied AI LearningProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655802(44-61)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628516.3655802
Moudgalya SZeller AStephenson BStone JBattestilli LRebelsky SShoop L(2024)The Need for More Justice-Oriented Courses in Undergraduate Computer Science CurriculaProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630949(888-894)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626252.3630949
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents