Winter 2022: Social Consequences in Computer: Fairness, Privacy, and Other Values

This class will cover the ways in which applications of computing affect societal institutions and how these social consequences produce questions about how to conceptualize, critique, and ensure our all-too human values in computing. To accomplish this, we will explore computing — particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning — in online platforms, algorithms, and policy-making, including exploring the role of AI in everything from personalization to surveillance to online speech. We will focus on those values where recent advances in computing have demonstrated large societal challenges: privacy, fairness, justice, and related values. We will critically examine the philosophical and sociological underpinnings of these values and the strategies commonly used to promote them, and seek to connect these conceptualizations to the emerging algorithmic tools proposed for promoting those values. In doing so, we will develop a diverse toolbox of computational, social, and political ideas, with the end goal of developing the ability to thoroughly reason through these problems in our own projects.