A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question:<\/p>\n
\nAs I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course “Can Computers Think?” (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course. If you have a minute, please let me know if you have any suggestions on the following topics:<\/p>\n
Technology and Privacy
\nSustainability
\nOwnership and intellectual property rights
\nThreats and possibilities of A.I.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nSome of these are pretty obvious– “Technology and Privacy” just cries out for Asimov’s “The Dead Past.” Others don’t lead to immediate suggestions, but I have some ideas of where to start– if Cory Doctorow hasn’t<\/strong> written stories illustrating ethical issues about “Ownership and intellectual property rights,” I’d be stunned, and after reading the wrist-slittingly depressing “Yellow Card Man,” I bet there’s something about sustainability in the work of Paolo Bacigalupi. <\/p>\n
But while I could come up with suggestions for most of these, it occurs to me that this is exactly what the Internet is for<\/strong>. So, suggest some science fiction stories, shows, or films to illustrate some of these points.<\/p>\n
The fine print:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Short is preferable to long, here– this isn’t a class about ethics in SF, it’s a class about CS, with an ethics component. Watching the entire run of “Babylon 5” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is not in the program.<\/p>\n
Obvious is better than subtle, here. Whatever you suggest should have the ethical issue front and center, not completely buried in the background. Again, it’s a CS class, not a literature class.<\/p>\n
The one exception to the previous: Do not suggest “The Cold Equations.”<\/p>\n
Try to keep your comments to a reasonable length. If I have to hit “Page Down” to get to the end of it, I’m not likely to read it. If you have that many recommendations, put them on a separate web page and post a link in the comments. This means you, Jonathan Vos Post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question: As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course “Can Computers Think?” (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course.… Continue reading Ethics in Science Fiction<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,35,37,29,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-movies","category-pop_culture","category-sf","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}