Topics, Readings, and Assignments

Essay	Proposal Due	Proposal Approvals	Essay Due	Peer Reviews Due
1	Saturday, 09/29	Monday, 10/01	Monday, 10/08	Monday, 10/15
2	Monday, 10/29	Wednesday, 10/31	Monday, 11/05	Monday, 11/12
3	Thursday, 11/29	Friday, 11/30	Monday, 12/03	Friday, 12/07

12/?? Income Inequality and the Bay Area, Education

No survey.

Barrera, Jeff, "In Search of Cheaper Housing, Silicon Valley Workers Face Long Commutes"

Singer, "The Singer Solution to World Poverty"

Maria Konnikova, "Will MOOCs be Flukes?"

KevinCarey, "An Online Education Breakthrough? A Master's Degree for a Mere $7,000"

Optional: Dalai Lama, The, "Dalai Lama: Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded"

11/26 The Distant Future

Complete the Last Lecture survey by 2 PM Monday (@berkeley.edu login required).

Aronoff, Kate, "Inside Geoengineers' Risky Plan To Block Out the Sun"

Kind, Amy, "Qualia", up to the end of section 1 (The Hard Problem of Consciousness)

Watch either of these (they are similar):

• Harris, Sam, "Can we build AI without losing control over it?"
• Bostrom, Nick, "What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?"

Optional: Brooks, Rodney, "The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI"

Optional: Brooks, Rodney, "What is it like to be a robot?"
Optional: Harris, Mark, "Inside the first church of artificial intelligence"

Optional: Wikipedia, "Climate change opinion by country"

11/5 Software Risks and Algorithmic Bias

Complete the Software Risks and Algorithmic Bias by 2pm Monday (@berkeley.edu login required).

Software Risks:

• Fabio, "Killed by a Machine: The Therac-25"
• Optional: Neumann, "Risks of Automation: A Cautionary Total-System Perspective of Our Cyberfuture" (need to read on campus or through campus VPN)
• Optional: Tufekci, "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads"

Algorithmic Bias:

• Angwin, "Make Algorithms Accountable."
• Davies, Pierson, Feller, Goel, "A computer program used for bail and sentencing decisions was labeled biased against blacks. It's actually not that clear."
• Optional: "Attacking discrimination with smarter machine learning"

10/29 Jobs and Automation

Complete the Jobs and Automation by 2pm Monday (@berkeley.edu login required).

CGP Grey, "Humans Need Not Apply"

Williams, "Will Robots Take Our Children's Jobs?"

Surowiecki, "The Great Tech Panic: Robots Won't Take All Our Jobs"

Optional: Bernstein, Raman "The Great Decoupling: An Interview with Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee"

Optional: McKinsey Global Institute, "Harnessing automation for a future that works" and the "Appendix"

10/22 Politics and Media

Complete the Politics and Media Survey by 2pm Monday (@berkeley.edu login required).

Tufekci, "Russian Meddling Is a Symptom, Not the Disease"

Kolbert, "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds"

Bertoni, "How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House"

Garrett, Resnick, "Resisting Political Fragmentation on the Internet" (optional)

Smiley, "The College Kids Doing What Twitter Won't" (optional)

10/15 Memes

Complete the Memes Survey by 2pm Monday (@berkeley.edu login required).

Ellis, "Online Conspiracy Theories: The Wired Guide"

CGP Grey, "This Video Will Make You Angry"

Heath, Bell, Sternberg, "Emotional selection in memes: the case of urban legends" (required VPN or being on campus) - alternative link

Optional: Shullenberger, "Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel's French Connection" (very weird/questionable read, but interesting)

10/08 Free Time and Attention

Complete the Free Time and Attention Survey by 2pm Monday (@berkeley.edu login required).

Twenge, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"

Becker, Rachel, "Why calling screen time "digital heroin" is digital garbage"

Tufecki, "Youtube, the Great Radicalizer"

Optional: Schwartz, "Finding It Hard to Focus? Maybe It's Not Your Fault"

Optional: Harris, "How better tech could protects us from distraction"

Optional: Lil B, "The Age of Information"

10/01 Professional Ethics and Moral Philosophy

This coming week, we'll do something a little different and discuss systems of ethics as taxonomized by the field of moral philosophers. I'll go over the three major schools of ethics in class, but you might find it helpful to watch these videos in advance so my overview is easier to follow.

Complete the Professional Ethics and Moral Philosophy Survey by 2pm Monday (@berkeley.edu login required).

ACM, "Professional Code of Conduct"

Systems of Ethics (Videos) (optional but recommended!):

• Consequentialism
• Virtue Ethics
• Paul Stearns (Blinn College), Kant's Morality part 1, Kant's Morality part 2 (optional)

Systems of Ethics (Game) (optional):

• Socrates Jones, Pro Philosopher

9/24 War

Complete the War Survey by 2pm Monday (@berkeley.edu login required).

Greenberg, "The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History"

Wakabayashi, Shane, "Google Will Not Renew Pentagon Contract That Upset Employees"

Optional (note: strongly political, I am not endorsing the opinions expressed): Jurecic, "Why Did You Wait?": Moral Emptiness and Drone Strikes

Optional: Walzer, Michael "Just & Unjust Targeted Killing & Drone Warfare" (requires being on campus or Berkeley VPN)

Optional: Valentino, Benjamin "Moral Character or Character of War? American Public Opinion on the Targeting of Civilians in Times of War" (requires being on campus or Berkeley VPN)

Optional: Dunlap Jr., Charles "The Military-Industrial Complex" (requires being on campus or Berkeley VPN)

9/17 Government Censorship and Surveillance

Complete the Government Censorship and Surveillance Survey by 2pm Monday (@berkeley.edu login required).

Manaugh, "Drone Cops Take Flight in Los Angeles"

Rainie, Maniam "Americans feel the tensions between privacy and security concerns"

Gallagher, "Senior Google Scientist Resigns Over "Forfeiture of Our Values" in China"

Optional but really interesting: Kayyali, "FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance" and Gage, "What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals"

9/10 Privacy

Complete the Privacy Survey by 2pm Monday (@berkeley.edu login required).

Menand, "Why Do We Care So Much About Privacy?"

Homayoun, "The Secret Social Media Lives of Teenagers"

Powazek, "I'm Not The Product, But I Play One on the Internet"

Rachels, "Why Privacy is Important" (optional, old school but interesting; VPN required)

8/27 Free Speech

In future weeks, readings will be required and there will also be a survey to fill out. For week 1, readings are optional and you can technically just show up cold, though it might be nice to have read the readings below for more context.

Optional: Wong, Solon, Does the banning of Alex Jones signal a new era of big tech responsibility?

Optional: Kang, Conger, Inside Twitter's Struggle Over What Gets Banned