Harvard, MIT, NYU among growing crop of US universities offering computer science ethics courses on AI, autonomous vehicles, privacy and civil rights in tech
PALO ALTO, Calif. — The medical profession has an ethic: First, do no harm. — Silicon Valley has an ethos: Build it first and ask for forgiveness later. Tweets: @ibogost , @mustafasuleymn , @zeynep , @carnage4life , @zeynep , and @pariseautt Tweets: Ian Bogost / @ibogost : Lots to say about this article, but for now, let me say that the ABET accredidation requirement for teaching ethics in CS is extremely pliable and basically anything goes. https://www.nytimes.com/... Mustafa Suleyman / @mustafasuleymn : Really pleased to see the start of this much needed shift towards ethics training as part of CS undergrad: https://www.nytimes.com/... Zeynep Tufekci / @zeynep : “rush” Many of us have been begging for this for years but.. never mind us. I know folks who advocated for this since the 70s! Even earlier. Also, cannot do ethics add-on, extra course. Ethics isn't an extra patch; it has to be built up from root—integral to design. http://twitter.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Stanford, Harvard & MIT creating computer ethics courses as a reaction to the #fakenews and the “Facebook effect”. A shame that this never occurred to them during the rise of insidious ad targeting http://www.nytimes.com/... Zeynep Tufekci / @zeynep : You have to integrate ethics into the computer science curriculum from the first moment you teach students here's a variable, here's an array, and look, we can sort things. When you run your first qsort, you've encountered ethical and ontological questions. Let's talk about them. Beth Pariseau / @pariseautt : “We need to at least teach people that there's a dark side to the idea that you should move fast and break things...” http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2018 wave of CS ethics courses at Harvard, MIT and NYU landed just as Silicon Valley's 'build first' ethos was under visible strain: within months, firms were formalizing internal ethics processes, including Facebook's automatic adviser for spotting machine-learning bias. Ian Bogost's caveat in the coverage — that the ABET accreditation requirement for teaching ethics in CS is 'extremely pliable' — frames why the course listings alone don't settle whether the training means anything.
What followed over the next five years tested that question from both ends: researchers flagged an oversight gap in which peer reviewers absorb the ethics burden, Slate argued ethics boards risk becoming moral cover rather than enforcement, and by 2023 the curriculum question had grown into a ready-made market of university, corporate and nonprofit AI courseware.
First-order effects
- CS students at Harvard, MIT, NYU and peers now encounter AI, autonomous-vehicle, privacy and civil-rights questions inside required coursework rather than only in elective philosophy seminars — though Bogost's point about pliable ABET standards means depth varies school to school.
- Mustafa Suleyman's public welcome of the shift signals that lab-side leaders see ethics-trained graduates as incoming hires, not critics outside the building.
Second-order effects
- Employers formalizing their own ethics machinery — Facebook's bias-spotting adviser among them — create hiring demand for exactly this training, turning ethics coursework into a labor-market credential.
- Student sentiment converts training into leverage: Stanford CS students' resistance to working at Palantir shows ethics education feeding directly into recruiting pressure on named firms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ethical review migrates from ad hoc individual conscience toward institutional fixtures — boards, accreditation requirements, formalized company processes — with the open question, per Slate and the New Yorker coverage, whether those structures enforce anything or merely certify good intentions.
- The longer arc runs from voluntary coursework toward standardized expectations for what a CS degree certifies, with accreditation bodies holding the lever Bogost identified as currently loose.
The trend: Computer science education is absorbing AI ethics into its core curriculum faster than the profession has built structures to enforce it, leaving coursework ahead of accountability.