Discussion Roles

Here are some roles you may use to guide your reading responses. As a discussion lead, you may ask students to address one or more of these perspectives in class.

Reporter

You work for a large newspaper, the Allen School Times, for which you regularly report on societal implications of technology. Prepare a very brief summary (1-2 sentences) of the main take-aways of each paper you are covering. Don’t just report on what the paper describes, but what its implications are. Next, run a background check on one of the paper’s authors. Where have they worked? What did they study? What previous projects might have led to working on this one? Finally, prepare 4-5 questions about the paper(s) that will steer class discussions. Use the responses of others on Canvas to inform at least some of these questions.

Press Intern

You are an intern for the Allen School Times where you are asked to support efforts to report on societal implications of technology. You are given a paper or article for which you must determine where it sits in the context of previous and subsequent societal issues. Find and report on a related paper (or news article) that has uncovered a related ethical issue. Like every good intern knows, one way to do this is to look at papers that cite this current work.

CEO

You work at a company or organization developing an application or product that is discussed in one of the papers we’re reading this week. Engaging in your best ethics washing and theatre, suggest changes to the product that pay lip service to ethics but do not actually address the issue at hand. Also be sure to convince your investors and employees that your company hasn’t really done anything wrong.

Utilitarian Tech Employee

You are a tech employee with a strong belief in Rule Utilitarianism, Prepare a convincing statement to your company leadership that lays out how a technology described in one of the papers we’re reading this week should change or not change.

Kantianism Activist

You are an activist who believes that following Kantianism will rescue our society from the problems of big tech. Prepare a short statement to convince the management of a tech company of specific actions they should take in relation to one or multiple products they are developing or owning. Your statement should be related to a technology or topic in the papers we’re reading this week.

You are a friend of the tech employee (the one who believes in Rule Utalitarianism). Over dinner, you try to convince your friend to talk to his company’s leadership to change their behavior to be more in line with social contract theory. Prepare a short statement that is related to a technology or topic in the papers we’re reading this week.

Cultural Relativist

As a friend of the CEO and a strong believer in cultural relativism, you are discussing with the CEO how a given class subject and/or technology may be seen differently by people in other countries and cultures. Pick 1-2 other countries and research what their national culture may say about their values. Alternatively, you can also pick a culture within the US, a subculture of another country, or a broader cultural tendency (for example, individualism vs. collectivism) and analyze how the subject and/or technology may be seen differently by this group of people. Prepare a short statement that would convince the CEO to reconsider prior decisions.