Reader for ECS 188 – Ethics in an Age of Technology – Spring 2009

This ever-evolving course reader has been assembled by Prof. Phillip Rogaway for exclusive use in UC Davis’ course ECS 188 — Ethics in an Age of Technology. The materials may be used only for this class. Many of the materials are password protected. Please see the copyright notice at the bottom of the page.

Beyond Computer Ethics

A merged pdf file (about 16 MB / 410 pages) contains most of the readings below.
  1. A brief note to the student by Phil Rogaway. April 2008.
    Sociological Perspectives
  2. Views of Technology (scan) by Ian Barbour. From Chapter 1 of Ethics in an Age of Technology (The Gifford Lectures, 1989–1991, Volume 2), HarperCollins, 1993. Password protected.
  3. Do Machines Make History?, by Robert L Heilbroner. Technology and Culture, vol. 8, pp. 335–345, July 1967. Password protected.
  4. Do Artifacts have Politics?, by Langdon Winner. From The Whale and the Reactor, The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Earlier version from Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Winter 1980.
  5. Five Things we Need to Know About Technological Change by Neil Postman. Speech given in Denver, Colorado, USA. March 27, 1998.
  6. McLuhan Interview with Marshal McLuhan. From Playboy, 1969. Some helpful vocabulary for this reading.
  7. Human Development Report 2005, Chapter 1. A United Nations publication. Or distributively read the full report (an overview and five chapters).
    Engineering Perspectives
  8. Technology and Social Justice by Freeman Dyson. The fourth Louis Nizer Lecture on Public Policy, November 5, 1997.
  9. Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, by Bill Joy. Appeared in Wired, issue 8.04, April 2000.
    Philosophical Perspectives
  10. Technological Subversion by David Strong. From Crazy Mountains: Learning from Wilderness to Weigh Technology. State University of New York Press, 1995. Password protected. Not yet OCR'd.
  11. Philosophical Ethics (scan) by Deborah Johnson. Chapter 2 from Computer Ethics, Prentice Hall, 2001. Password protected.
  12. The Altered Nature of Human Action (scan) by Hans Jonas. Chapter 1 from The Imperative of Responsibility. University of Chicago Press, 1985. Password protected.
    Some helpful vocabulary for this reading.
    Historical Perspectives
  13. Industrial Society and Technological Systems (scan) by Ruth Schwartz Cowan. From A Social History of American Technology, pp. 149–172, 1997. Password protected. Maybe try a different chapter from the book, perhaps the one on medical technology.
    Economic Perspectives
  14. The Lexus and the Olive Tree (scan) by Thomas Friedman. A selection (13 pages) from Friedman’s book of the same title, including portions of Chapters 1, 3, and 12. Anchor Books, Random House, 1999. Password protected.
  15. A Road Map for Natural Capitalism (original) by Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, and Paul Hawken, Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1999. Password protected.
    The Environment
  16. The Tragedy of the Commons (scan) (text) by Garrett Hardin. Science, vol. 168, pp. 1243–1248, December 13, 1968. Password protected.
  17. The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today? by Jared Diamond. Chapter 16 from Collapse: How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed, Viking Penguin, 2005. Not yet OCR'd
    War
  18. War (original URL) by Brian Orend. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published Feb 4, 2000; last revised July 28, 2005.
  19. Computers, Ethics, and Collective Violence (scan) by Craig Summers and Eric Markusen. Journal of Systems and Software, vol. 17, pp. 91–103, 1992. Password protected.
  20. Farewell Address to the Nation by Dwight D. Eisenhower January 17, 1961. A very short reading to pair with the film "Why We Fight"
    Intellectual Property
  21. Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure & The Disappearance of the Public Domain by James Boyle. Daedalus, 2002. Password protected. Longer verion: The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain, James Boyle, 2003.
  22. The GNU Manifesto (original URL) by Richard Stallman. 1985.
  23. The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution. By Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman. Proc. of the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management.
  24. Microsoft Research DRM Talk by Cory Doctorow, 2004.
    Privacy
  25. Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society by Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt. Manuscript prepared under the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. January 2003.
  26. The Transparent Society by David Brin. Excerpted from The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom, 1998. Reading taken from the author's webpage.
  27. Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption: Updated and Expanded Edition by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, 2007. Distributively read hardcopy.
    Incidents
  28. Bhopal Lives by Suketu Mehta. Appeared in The Village Voice on Dec 3, 1996 and on Dec 10, 1996. Password protected.
  29. The Therac-25 Accidents by Nancy G. Leveson. Appears on the author's website and as Appendix A of Safeware: System Safety and Computers, Addison-Wesley Professional, 1995.
  30. The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis (OCR-produced html) by Joe Morgenstern. The New Yorker, May 29, 1995, pp. 45–53. Password protected.
    Our Profession
  31. (a) ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, 1992; (b) IEEE Code of Ethics, 2006; and (c) Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practices, 1997. Accompanying materials: some scenarios collected up from Sara Baase’s book.
  32. Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women and Computing (scan3, scan6) by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. The reading (14 pages) is an except from Chapters 3 and 6 of Margolis and Fisher's book published by MIT Press, 2002. Password protected. Reconsider if selecting the right portion from the book. Do not omit.
  33. The Future of Our Profession by Bo Dahlbom and Lars Mathiassen. CACM, 40(2), June 1997. Password protected.
  34. Disciplined Minds (scan) by Jeff Schmidt. The reading (17 pages) is a selection drawn from chapters 1, 2, 3, and 13 of Schmidt's book, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Password protected.
  35. Some pledges

We will also see the following films:
  1. Dekalog (Part 1), 1989. Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. Time is 51.5 mins (beginning to start of credits). Following some introductory remarks, I always show this film in the first class meeting.
  2. An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Presented by Al Gore, directed by Davis Guggenheim. Custom CD omits first 34 seconds of chapter 1, and omits 10, 12, 13, and 15. Time is 79 mins to start of credits, and 84 mins including enjoyable credits.
  3. Why We Fight, 2005. Written and directed by Eugene Jarecki. Custom CD omits chapters 2 and 5. Time is 79.5 mins (start to beginning of credits) .
  4. The Corporation, 2003. Written by Joel Bakan, directed by Mark Archbar and Jennifer Abbott. Custom CD includes chapters 1–5, 8:[beg–47:29], 8:[51:33–end], 10:[beg–1:02:34], 16[1:24:56–1:26:45], 18, 19:[beg–1:50:27], 22:[2:02:40–2:17:23], 23–24. Time is 79.5 mins (beginning to start of credits).
This reader is a living document. If you have suggestions for additions, deletions, or changes, please let me know.

Important Copyright Information The materials assembled here are exclusively for educational purposes in one particular class at UCD. Some of the materials are in the public domain or have very unrestrictive use permissions, and but some of the materials are conventional copyrighted materials. They are included in this reader with careful consideration to the four factors used in ascertaining fair use and have been placed in a password-protected subdirectory. I have marked those entries Password protected. Many of these are OCR’d from scans. The scans themselves (which I also include in the password-protected subdirectory) were very large and sometimes not too legible, which is why they have been OCR’d.

Last updated Aug 24, 2008