Professor Deb Donig, Spring 2020
Google. Facebook. Twitter. Uber. Tinder. The way that we navigate our world and our lives has been fundamentally changed by the ideas, the decisions, the designs, and the developers of 20th and 21st century technologists. The products of those decisions, designs, and developments have changed how we understand and relate to each other. Throughout the history of technological production, fiction has played a central role, collaborating with technologists in market production and fueling the desire for technological creation and futuristic environments. How do works of imagination—namely science fiction—help us understand the ethical questions that technological innovation poses?
Science fiction is often engineered in conversation with consulting technologists; technology is often engineered in conversation with the visions created by imagineers, including writers, artists, and filmmakers. What is the dynamic between imagining as a practice of building fictional worlds, and imagining as a practice of building real technologies? What does science fiction’s vision of the future tells about the culture of technological innovation, and what does science fiction about how we understand as “the human,” even as science changes what it means to be human? In this course, we will look critically at the concept of “the good’ and “the human” in relationship to tech, in order to understand the hopes, the challenges, and the consequences of technological production.
We will also investigate the structure and the culture of the tech industry to consider how the passions, the biases, and the blind spots of those who govern and participate in its culture are built into seemingly neutral forms of technology. We will read art that engages with the complexities of technological design and its global distribution.
Finally, we will investigate the relationship between art and tech to consider how humanists might participate in--and perhaps alter--the course and the culture of technology in today’s world. In addition to exploring the genre of science fiction, this course will consider the place of humanistic inquiry, specifically literary inquiry, in the sphere of technological production. How can a humanistic inquiry like literary studies live and work alongside technological production, and what would a humanistic approach to technology look like, accomplish, enable, or perhaps block? How might humanists, and a type of culturally critical and particularly literary way of thinking, intervene into conversations about the ethics of technological production?
Reading Schedule:
Introduction to Ethical Technology:
The Culture of Technology and “The Good”
Plato Republic (selections); Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, Ted Nelson Computer Lib/Dream Machine
Unit 1: Humans + Tech Today: The State of the Union
John Cassidy “Me Media,” Tim Wu The Attention Merchants (selections), Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, George Saunders “The Brain-Dead Megaphone,” Aldous Huxley Brave New World, Dave Eggers The Circle
Unit 2: Planetary
Wole Talabi, “Necessary and Sufficient Conditions”
N.K Jemisin “Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows”
Kodwo Eshun, “Further Notes on Afrofuturism”
Octavia Butler “A Necessary Being”
Martin Amis, “The Janitor on Mars”
Rebecca Roanhorse “Welcome To Your Authentic Indian Experience”
Manjula Padmanabhan Harvest
Unit 3: What We Know: Artificial Intelligence
Minority Report
Westworld
Ted Nelson ComputerLib / Dream Machines
Unit 4: Our Future will be Utopia or Dystopia?
Andrew Marantz Antisocial
Yuval Noah Harari Homo Deus
E.M Forster The Machine Stops
George Orwell 1984
Wall-E
Ethical Tech: Using Tech for Service
In addition to course readings and assignments, students will partner with a company or organization that exemplifies ethical technology. Examples include Miracle Messages, which uses social media platforms to reconnect homeless people with their families and loves ones; Blavity / Afrotech which works to create a DEI media culture for black millennials; YALA Young Leaders, which builds millennial community across borders; Miracle Messages, which uses social media to help people experiencing homelessness find their loved ones; and the AMEL Project, which uses online environments to advocate for human rights. Our class readings, discussions, and writing assignments revolve around the fictional and imaginative sphere of literature--particularly science fiction. But science fiction never fully resides within the realm of imagining--this body of literature tells us what our hopes, fears, and concepts of technology are. In fact, much technological innovation, and the way technologists imagine, is inextricably linked with the imaginative sphere. While this literature will help us understand big picture issues on a national or international scale, we, as Californians, and as scholars and thinkers at a technical university, have plenty to interrogate and learn from in our own backyard. Thus, this class prioritizes local community engagement as a means of learning, thinking critically, and acting. The skills and ideas we will grapple with in this course are neither abstract nor imaginary; they are the building blocks of Silicon Valley and Silicon Beach. Students will engage the critical skills and ideas fostered in this class in engaging with ethical tech partners, working alongside those who are involved with using technology to grapple with human problems, and who are using humanistic strategies to counter problems created by tech. In so doing, students will gain hands-on knowledge and experience of the relationship between ideas and their implementation as strategies, and will also put into practice the ideas and stakes of ethical technology.