Computer Ethics, Week 11

Nov 17, 2025

Class 11 Readings

Read the Chapter 4 section on patents

Class next week (November 24) will be entirely online.

Paper2:

Yes, probable cause is also subjective. But not in quite the same way as long-term surveillance.

Paper 3

Debates

Artificial Intelligence: what are the ethical issues?

Maybe discrimination is the biggest. Your facial-recognizer or your recidivism-predictor may be trained on racially biased data, so this may result in Black Americans being more likely to be identified as criminals or as likely to commit additional crimes. There is quite a bit of evidence that this has actually happened in the past. Some of the training parameters can be statistical stand-ins for being Black. Zip codes are a classic example, though there are others.

Patents

Crime

Antitrust