Computing ethics instruction is a vital aspect of the undergraduate computing curriculum. It has received greater focus in recent years driven in part by concerns about the societal impacts of computing technologies such as social media and artificial intelligence. The increased attention provides an opportunity, even an imperative, to examine and rethink common practices. To support our understanding of current practices in computing ethics education, we surveyed 318 computing educators in the United States (U.S.), including 56 who have never taught ethics. The survey included questions about ethics teaching methods and challenges the instructors confronted. We show that ethical frameworks are frequently taught yet teaching them is regarded as one of the least important learning outcomes, and that respondents largely do not consider author demographics when selecting readings for their ethics classes, which could limit the diversity in perspectives present in the course. We conclude with recommendations for improving teaching methods, materials selection, and deployment strategies in computing ethics education, and discuss their implications for promoting more inclusive computing ethics education curricula in the U.S.

Computing Ethics (CE) courses are an increasingly important component of the undergraduate computing curriculum because of the outsized influence of computing on society. CE encompasses topics from multiple disciplines including the humanities; however, it is typically taught by educators within a Computer Science (CS) department in most undergraduate institutions in the United States, potentially leading to a less than comprehensive CE education for students. We surveyed 318 computing educators in US higher education to investigate CS educators' perceptions of how CE topics should ideally be taught. Most of our respondents thought that CE should be taught by a multidisciplinary team of instructors, and further that it should be taught both as a standalone course and embedded in other courses. Our research provides insights into ways to improve CE education that result in a better student experience.

The HCI research community has long centered ethics in HCI research and practice. This interest has persisted as scholars highlight the need for more situated understandings and deeper integration of ethics into HCI. In parallel, HCI scholars and students have become increasingly involved in teaching computing ethics across many different university contexts, bringing in valuable perspectives informed by the connections between HCI and the socio-technical subject matter of computing ethics. Yet explicitly bringing these two threads together – examining the teaching of ethics through an HCI research lens – remains nascent. This paper integrates work in HCI and computing education to focus on the role and experience of computing ethics teaching assistants (CETAs), who are increasingly involved in ethics instruction and whose perspectives are predominantly missing in existing literature spanning HCI and computing education. Drawing on HCI theories and methods, our qualitative study of eleven CETAs at two American universities makes three contributions to the HCI literature. First, we build an understanding of who these TAs are with respect to the unique position of teaching computing ethics. Second, we characterize how CETAs’ teaching and learning is situated and shaped within different communities and institutional contexts. Finally, we suggest several implications for the design of ethics instruction within undergraduate computing programs. More broadly, our work can be viewed as a call to action, encouraging HCI scholars to play a more significant role in studying and designing the teaching and learning of computing ethics.

For decades, determining how to teach computing ethics effectively to undergraduate students has been a major concern. As more universities integrate computing ethics into their curriculum, or seek to further refine existing content, who is involved in teaching computing ethics has come to include both graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs). However, the role of TAs in ethics education is not well-understood, nor are the responsibilities, challenges, and support needs that might distinguish Computing Ethics TAs (CETAs) from their peers in technical computing courses. This paper addresses this gap in two ways, drawing on qualitative and design research methods. First, by interviewing CETAs and their supervising faculty at two universities, we identified common motivations, struggles, and goals among CETAs. Second, drawing on this data, we developed and piloted a cross-institutional support network for CETAs on the messaging platform Discord. Despite challenges in the deployment of the server, our results indicate that cross-institutional online communities have the potential to assist CETAs in professional development, in expanding perspectives, and in strategies for dealing with difficult topics. Furthermore, our platform can be retooled for future use within and between computing ethics courses. We hope that our research will contribute to fostering community and support for CETAs as part of improving computing ethics curriculum writ large.

In response to widespread calls for computer scientists to better engage with the ethical dimensions of their work, there has been a surge of interest to embed ethics across the computer science (CS) curriculum. Yet one key set of barriers to doing so can be broadly described as scaling challenges -- in the number and breadth of courses in a curriculum and in the number of students in the CS major. Our paper describes and makes available a novel activity for teaching ethics using role-play that has advantages for scaling across different courses and in different delivery modes, including synchronous and asynchronous online course offerings. We describe our design process and early findings from developing the activity in a large first year seminar course, a senior-level computing and society class, and three different online graduate level courses. Further, we describe an evaluation survey that instructors can use to assess the short-term impact of the activity. We analyze survey results and our direct observations to reflect on the strengths and challenges of the activity. Our experiences suggest that role-play as a pedagogical tool can be particularly useful to broaden student perspectives and meaningfully incorporate ethics into CS courses.

Since 2016, more than 80 AI ethics documents - including codes, principles, frameworks, and policy strategies - have been produced by corporations, governments, and NGOs. In this paper, we examine three topics of importance related to our ongoing empirical study of ethics and policy issues in these emerging documents. First, we review possible challenges associated with the relative homogeneity of the documents' creators. Second, we provide a novel typology of motivations to characterize both obvious and less obvious goals of the documents. Third, we discuss the varied impacts these documents may have on the AI governance landscape, including what factors are relevant to assessing whether a given document is likely to be successful in achieving its goals.

The attribution of human-like characteristics onto humanoid robots has become a common practice in Human-Robot Interaction by designers and users alike. Robot gendering, the attribution of gender onto a robotic platform via voice, name, physique, or other features is a prevalent technique used to increase aspects of user acceptance of robots. One important factor relating to acceptance is user trust. As robots continue to integrate themselves into common societal roles, it will be critical to evaluate user trust in the robot's ability to perform its job. This paper examines the relationship among occupational gender-roles, user trust and gendered design features of humanoid robots. Results from the study indicate that there was no significant difference in the perception of trust in the robot's competency when considering the gender of the robot. This expands the findings found in prior efforts that suggest performance-based factors have larger influences on user trust than the robot's gender characteristics. In fact, our study suggests that perceived occupational competency is a better predictor for human trust than robot gender or participant gender. As such, gendering in robot design should be considered critically in the context of the application by designers. Such precautions would reduce the potential for robotic technologies to perpetuate societal gender stereotypes.

Using the COVID-19 pandemic to frame the discussion, this paper explores the potential ethical impacts of a greater reliance on robots during a public health emergency. Through an examination of various uses of different kinds of robots across the prevention, response, and recovery phases of the pandemic, this paper considers ethical pitfalls as well as the possible benefits of expanded deployment and use of robots to facilitate human management of public health emergencies. Alongside consideration of pandemic-related uses of robots, this paper also explores ethical concerns related to their use in public health practice and health care beyond the context of a public health emergency.

Many of us, roboticists and those who collaborate with them, experience delight, excitement, and sometimes deep-seated, but rarely unvoiced, fears as we witness our robotic systems begin to impact human lives in countless ways.From automating driving to reshaping various facets of health care delivery, robotic systems are growing in their prevalence and intrusiveness into our daily lives.In combination with our siblings in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community, scholars continue to predict a wide range of benefits from robotics and AI systems but also serious harms, including potential existential threats to humanity.Recognized pillars of science and engineering, including Elon Musk and the late great Stephen Hawking, have given voice to the apocalyptic kinds of fears that the public may have about an increasingly automated future.Whether these fears should be taken seriously is an issue that has divided scholars for awhile now, as illustrated by debates between Bill Joy [7] and Ray Kurzweil [8] at the beginning of the 21st century.On a different scale of granularity, a category of harms that users and others are more likely to experience on a day-to-day basis is from the various types of bias encoded in, or learned by, AI systems.This category of harms is especially troublesome in the world of physical robotics.Nonembodied AI systems can obviously make decisions that have effects on human beings, such as a chatbot determining what to say in response to a customer's question on a company's helpline.Yet it will need to rely on an embodied entity (often a human) to have a direct impact on the physical world.Typically, a nonembodied AI agent provides input to humans who may then execute a physical action -whether those humans are making an employment decision to hire or fire or deciding on a health care intervention for a patient.By definition, it lacks the capability of acting on the world without assistance.Robots that have a physical form, on the other hand, can perform actions on their own.This can raise the ethical stakes in terms of the potential benefits and harms that may result from the technology.The benefits and harms that we are particularly concerned about here are related to bias.