Programming Languages (CS 152) – Spring 2021

Module Topic: Programming Ethical Performance
Module Author: Zachary Gabor

Course Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
AY: 2020-2021

Course Description: “Comprehensive introduction to the principal features and overall design of both traditional and modern programming languages, including syntax, formal semantics, abstraction mechanisms, modularity, type systems, naming, polymorphism, closures, continuations, and concurrency. Provides the intellectual tools needed to design, evaluate, choose, and use programming languages.” (Course description) 

Semesters Taught: Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023

Tags

• software verification and validation (CS)
• machine ethics (both)
• moral rights (phil)

Module Overview

The goal of this module is to convey to students a tractable methodology for thinking about designing systems to perform in ethically acceptable ways and testing them.

    Connection to Course Material

From David Gray Grant’s Entry: “In the lead-up to the module, the course covers automated techniques that can be used to verify that a software system will behave in accordance with its design specifications. In this module, we introduce the idea of ethical design specifications, and consider how these might be verified (either using techniques covered in the course, or other methods).”

Goals

Module Goals

1. Familiarize students with a tractable general framework for identifying ethical requirements on software performance.
2. Provide students with practice devising such constraints to applications.

    Key Philosophical Questions

1. What are ethical requirements on machine performance and how do we identify them?
2. How can ethical operation be ensured during the process of verification and validation?

Materials

    Key Philosophical Concepts

• Rights
• Interests
• Stakeholders

    Assigned Readings

• Chloe Rose Stuart-Ulin (2018), “Microsoft’s politically correct chatbot is even worse than its racist one”
• Jason Torchinsky (2018) Consumer Group Says Tesla’s Autopilot Is ‘Deceptive,’ Calls For Investigation (jalopnik.com)

Implementation

    Class Agenda

1. Introduction to three case studies: the Therac-25 (radiation therapy machine that killed and injured patients due to software bugs), Microsoft’s Tay and Zo, and Tesla’s autopilot
2. Presentation: Stakeholder Analysis 
3. Stages in ethical software design
4. Activity: apply ethics-focused design

    Sample Class Activity

Students are asked to consider how the method of stakeholder analysis could have had an effect in mitigating the harms in the three cases discussed.

Divided into groups, students are asked to perform a stakeholder analysis on each of the three cases. They then are prompted to formulate rules constraining the performance of the systems being designed in each case. Finally, they consider ways in which ethical performance in the case they were studying could have been ensured by verification or validation.

    Module Assignment

Students are asked to apply stakeholder analysis to the design of an automated weapons system. They are prompted to formulate rules which respect the identified ethical requirements in cases where communication between the weapons system operator and the system dropped or experienced high latency.

Lessons Learned

Student responses to the follow-up assignment were quite detailed and well thought out. We think this is a sign that it is probably doable and worthwhile to challenge students by introducing subtleties about stakeholder analysis in class. For instance: in major enterprises like the projects of multinational corporations or state actors, it is conceivable that everyone in the world is a stakeholder in the enterprise, i.e. someone whose rights or interests might well be affected by how the project goes. To accommodate this point it could be useful to discuss ways of thinking about stakeholdership as a matter of degree and ways in which this affects ethical constraints on design.