First Blog Post: Best Computer Science Experiences

So for our final topic presentations, the topic that I’d be most interested in hearing more about is automation and how it affects and will affect the world in the coming decades. I think, in general, its kind of fascinating to speculate what will happen if most or all of our jobs become replaced by computers. There was even some talk about this in the 2020 democratic candidate race from Andrew Yang, as well as President Obama’s “American Factory” documentary on Netflix. Without getting into heavy detail about automation, it does seem like the world to me is headed in the direction of complete automation. The issue isn’t really about whether or not it is possible for AI to perform these tasks, its about what our species will do about it. Therefore, I think it’d be fascinating to see what someone in our class has to say about this issue.

So this week in our seminar class, we took a look at privacy and how it applies to CS, and to do so, we engaged in the frowned upon activity of researching another person in class to see what we could find on them, and have them do the same to us to reveal how big our digital footprint is. To research my partner, I used the most basic research tools like public records, google, search.appstate.edu, etc. To no surprise, I found about as much as one would expect– what city they live(ed) in, some connection with where they went to school, stuff like that. My overall impression with the assignment was that while it did feel kind of nefarious researching somebody online, we were doing it for an assignment, and I did get some useful feedback about my own digital footprint.

So the first important/most interesting thing that I learned from this class was other people’s views on ethics and where they come from. Going into this class without much knowledge of where other CS students get their ethics, I blindly assumed that most of their ethics came from religion. Even though I would say Appalachian state is kind of classified as being in the south, its no secret that its a liberal college town. Nevertheless, growing up in the ‘actual’ south, I suspected that more people would say in their presentations that their morals come from christianity, but from what I remember from a few months ago, most people said their morals come from something along the lines of the golden rule, or from their mothers. So, I found that interesting.

The second interesting thing I learned this semester are the grey areas of ethics in computer science. The thing that comes to mind here is the privacy policy assignment where we researched the terms of service for software program that we use. I looked into the mobile app textra, and it was really interesting how textra, along with most others of its kind, can store your personal information without it being made explicit in the TOS.

The last thing would be bitcoin. Not having much knowledge of the stock market, and likewise, bitcoin, I thought Dr. Wilkes’ rather positive experience with bitcoin investing was fascinating. I really want to look into bitcoin now.

The one piece of advice that I would give to future students is, quite simply, that this is an easy class. Junior seminar was tough, with either professor that currently teaches it. As long as you do the assignments, its a simple course. They’re mostly blogs and ethical discussions, as opposed to the normal hardcore, objectively right-or-wrong-answer CS programming assignments, and the assignments are credit/no credit; its an easy A/A-.

I guess in a few words, the oral presentations on ethics weren’t that surprising. As far as I remember, a majority of people in the class said they get their ethics from the golden rule, (you wouldn’t do that to yourself, why do it to others), which is what I thought most people would say. Although, as somebody who comes from the southern U.S., far fewer people in the class said that their personal ethics come from religion than I was expecting.