by ilex

Not quite what I expected to find in my inbox from the ACM this morning:

It is time for us in computing departments to do some comparable soul searching.

This article is one attempt at this task. It argues the well-publicized social ills of computing will not go away simply by integrating ethics instruction or codes of conduct into computing curricula. The remedy to these ills instead lies less in philosophy and more in fields such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science.

In the contemporary world, power rarely relies on coercion, but instead is enacted through persuasion—that is, by the construction of meaning through knowledge production and distributed by communication systems. Scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, focused their power analysis on newspapers, radio, and TV, but in the past decade a wide range of scholars from fields as diverse as law, sociology, economics, and communications are now focused on the truth-and power-constructing regimes of data and the algorithms that process it. Power "is operationalized through the algorithm, in that the algorithmic output cements, maintains or produces certain truths."3 Or, simply, "Data are a form of power."

By only having a single mandated course about the relationship of computing to the wider human and social world, how can it not but strike a student that this is peripheral (and hence irrelevant) knowledge?

This is the natural consequence of the engineering model that computing curricula seems to inhabit. That is, the belief there is so much computing and mathematics content to be learned that there is no room for anything else. As a result, we normalized the belief that the world is irrelevant next to computing precisely through the structure of our curriculum. It is sometimes said that workers of organizations adopt a world view that is a reflection of the organizational structure of their workplace. Our students do so as well, except in this case, it's their academic discipline's organization. This is a problem though that we can fix ... or at the very least make an attempt at doing it better.