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Comment by lhc- | Hacker News Reader

While in school for Computer Engineering (2002-2007 or so), I actually had two ethics classes, one specifically for Engineering and one for Information ethics. I dont know how standard that is, but all the engineering disciplines had to take the Engineering one and computer scienc-y students had to take Info ethics.

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Same here (2006-2011), and it was actually pretty fun to talk about the ethical issues that can arise in our profession(s).

The extent of computer ethics to me was "here is therac-25, you have an ethical responsibility to do your job well. here are various laws, don't break them." There was never talk of "consider the ramifications of your project, assuming it works".

Interesting. I'd never heard of this, but it makes sense. Whereabouts did you go to school?

I took a couple engineering ethics classes at the University of Virginia (class of '06), and found them valuable and thought-provoking. The curriculum was called "Science, Technology, and Society". More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology_and_society

Dayton, Ohio. We talked about a lot of interesting topics, like Whistleblowing (particularly relevant nowadays) and what sort of ethical obligations you have, in addition to stuff like "dont cut corners, dont be lazy, etc", the normal engineering things.

I graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 1997, and we also had to take an ethics class. However, it was more along the lines of knowingly creating software or hardware that would cause harm. To be honest, the majority of the tests we had were common sense..I didn't even have to even look over the material.

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