Post #1786895

2026-04-18 20:22 UTC

I&#39;m very excited to be starting a visiting position in the computer science department at St. Olaf College this autumn! In addition to an introductory programming course (&quot;CS1&quot;, as people in CS ed say), I&#39;ll be teaching two upper-division courses: Foundations of AI, and Ethics in Software Design. I&#39;ve never taught either of those, but am very excited about them. Do *you* have any idea of what Kids These Days should know about either of those topics? I do have the summer free -- I&#39;m open to volunteering, or something temporary. I&#39;m contemplating something that would, in a way, prepare me for teaching both of the courses above: some kind of job labeling AI training data. #cs #ai #stolaf

Replies (5)

@oantolin@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-18 20:31

@ddrake@mathstodon.xyz Isn't ethics considered completely irrelevant for software design nowadays? 🙁

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@synlogic4242@social.vivaldi.net 2026-04-18 21:56

@ddrake@mathstodon.xyz congrats!

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@RuchiraSDatta@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-18 22:38

@ddrake@mathstodon.xyz Ethics in Software Design ought to include environmental concerns about efficiency of software, especially if it is going to be scaled massively.

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@ky@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-18 22:56

@ddrake@mathstodon.xyz if you as you said are free but not yet a part of the https://www.appliedai.mn/ community I'd suggest to join it. They meet regularly at Lab651 which is located conviniently on Vandalia st. just off of i94 and they talk about all things AI, all facets of it, and they can talk indefinitely about it, oftentimes transitioning to the next door Lake Monster. I haven't been to the meetups for some while due to scheduling conflicts on my side. But who knows, if I can free up those nights this summer I'll gladly go again.

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@aerynv2@tenforward.social 2026-04-19 14:10

@ddrake@mathstodon.xyz "what are the society-level negative externalities of this?" / "why shouldn't we build this at all?" / "what marginalized group will this tech make life harder for and how?" -- all questions that don't typically get asked in the tech ethics course and should (I mean, it's been 20 years for me, but we mostly got "here's Kant and Bentham, with a side of Therac and other cautionary tales")

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