Readings and activities for the week; this link posted to Discord in #announcements.
On Monday . . .
In class today we will discuss the Reclaim Hosting (or other hosting company) login, the WordPress dashboard, there differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and the difference between FOSS (free and open source software) and proprietary software. These concepts are crucial for an understanding of the priorities of this course.
We’ll also be starting to develop an understanding of what ethics means at the intersection of humanistic inquiry and computer science. One of you found an interesting source last week (Moor’s “What Is Computer Ethics?”). I’ve bundled that into our readings for this week so that we can discuss it.
Readings to complete for Wednesday. Come to class prepared with 300 words worth of brainstorm notes in which you reflect on 1) connections between these sources; 2) terms that you think need to be defined (and a definition that you like if you can find it); and 3) an argument that you’d like to make about one or more of these sources w/r/t genAI.
- “What Is Computer Ethics?” by Moor, 1985.
- “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” by Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, and Shimtchell, March 2021.
- Tweet by Altman, December, 2022.
On Wednesday . . .
We’ll have an involved conversation of ethics in which we will start defining some categories and terms. I’ll be describing my Class Reading Activity (CRA), which is a format that we’ll use for preparing for discussions. (Have a look at that post if you have time, but I’ll be discussing it in class on Wednesday).
By Monday, 8/26, read:
- “We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says.” by Hao in MIT Tech Review, 2020.
- “Ego, Fear, and Money” by several authors at NYT, (2023)
Activity to complete by Monday:
- Install a new “theme” on your WP site.
- Personalize the language on the landing page.
- Compose and publish an “about me” page accessible by a button on the front page.
- Delete the “Hello World” post.
- Compose a publish 100-200 words of analysis on our readings from this week that includes hyperlinks to sources; be ready to share the link to that post in class on Monday.
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