ECS 188 – Ethics in an Age of Technology – Reader – Spring 2008
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.
Beyond Computer Ethics
-
A brief note to the student by Phil Rogaway. April 2008.
Introduction
-
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.
-
Do Machines Make History?, by
Robert L Heilbroner.
Technology and Culture, vol. 8, pp. 335–345, July 1967.
Password protected.
-
Do Artifacts have Politics?, by
Langdon Winner.
Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Winter 1980.
- Mirrored by Our Machines, by John Lienhard
Chapter 1 from
The Engines of our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture.
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hardcopy only; drop from future versions of the reader.
-
Five Things we Need to Know About Technological Change by
Neil Postman.
Speech given in Denver, Colorado, USA. March 27, 1998.
Philosophical Ethics
-
Philosophical Ethics by
Deborah Johnson.
Chapter 2 from
Computer Ethics, Prentice Hall, 2001. Password protected.
-
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.
-
Technological Subversion by
David Strong.
From
Crazy Mountains: Learning from Wilderness to
Weigh Technology. State University of New York Press, 1995.
Password protected.
Still need to OCR this
Social Perspectives
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The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race by
Jared Diamond.
Discover Magazine, May 1987.
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Industrial Society and Technological Systems
(scan)
by
Ruth Schwartz Cowan.
From
A Social History of American Technology,
pp. 149–172, 1997.
Password protected.
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Technology and Social Justice by
Freeman Dyson.
The fourth Louis Nizer Lecture on Public Policy, November 5, 1997.
-
McLuhan Interview with Marshal
McLuhan.
From Playboy, 1969.
Some
helpful vocabulary for this reading.
Global Perspectives
-
The Lexus and the Olive Tree
(scan)
by
Thomas Friedman.
A selection (13 pages) from
Friedman’s book of this title, including
portions of Chapters 1, 3, and 12. Anchor Books, Random House, 1999.
Password protected.
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Bhopal Lives by
Suketu Mehta.
Appeared in The Village Voice on Dec 3, 1996 and on Dec 10, 1996.
Password protected.
-
Human Development Report 2005, Chapter 1. A
United Nations publication.
Or distributively read the
full report (an overview and five chapters).
The Environment
-
The Tragedy of the Commons by
Garrett Hardin.
Science, vol. 168,
pp. 1243–1248, December 13, 1968.
Still need to retypeset this. Start with
text version
-
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.
-
Climate Change 2007: Summary for Policy Makers [color document] by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
November 2007.
War
-
War
(original URL)
by
Brian Orend.
In the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
First published Feb 4, 2000; last revised July 28, 2005.
-
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.
-
Farewell Address to the Nation
by Dwight D. Eisenhower
January 17, 1961.
Human Extinction
-
Beyond War: A New Way of Thinking
by Richard T. Roney.
From
Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking, 1988.
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Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, by
Bill Joy.
Appeared in Wired, issue 8.04, April 2000.
Intellectual Property
-
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.
-
The GNU Manifesto
(original URL)
by
Richard Stallman.
1985.
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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.
-
Microsoft Research DRM Talk by
Cory Doctorow, 2004.
Privacy
- Privacy by Michael J. Quinn.
Chapter 5 from
Ethics for the Information Age (3rd edition). Addison Wesley, February 2008.
No scan available, was distributed as hardcopy. Drop from future versions of the reader.
Our Profession
-
An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents
by Nancy G. Leveson and
Clark S. Turner.
IEEE Computer, vol 26, no 7, pp. 18–41, July 1993.
-
The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis
(OCR-produced html)
by Joe Morgenstern. The New Yorker, May 29, 1995, pp. 45–53.
Password protected.
-
(a)
ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, 1992.
(b)
IEEE Code of Ethics, 2006
(c)
Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practices, 1997.
Accompanying materials: some
scenarios collected up from Sara Baase’s book.
-
Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women and Computing
( scan3,
scan6)
by
Jane Margolis and
Allan Fisher.
The readnig (14 pages) is an except from Chapters 3 and 6 of
Margolis and Fisher's
book published by MIT Press, 2002.
Password protected.
-
The Future of Our Profession
by Bo Dahlbom and
Lars Mathiassen.
CACM, 40(2), June 1997.
Password protected.
-
Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and
the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives
(scan)
by
Jeff Schmidt.
The reading (17 pages) is a selection drawn from chapters 1, 2, 3, and 13 of
Schmidt's book, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
Password protected
-
Some pledges
We will also see the following films:
- 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.
-
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.
-
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) .
-
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).
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 with highy unrestrictive use permissions.
Some materials are widely available on the Internet already.
But some of the materials are conventional copyrighted materials.
They are included in this reader with
careful consideration to the 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 I
OCR’d them.
Last updated May 12, 2008