The ethical dilemma facing Silicon Valley’s next generation

reality is finally catching up with stanford university and its student body, i guess! some standout points:

But the endless barrage of negative news in tech, ranging from Facebook fueling propaganda campaigns by Russian trolls to Amazon selling surveillance software to governments, has forced Stanford to reevaluate its role in shaping the Valley’s future leaders. Students are reconsidering whether working at Google or Facebook is landing a dream job or selling out to craven corporate interests. Professors are revamping courses to address the ethical challenges tech companies are grappling with right now. And university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne has made educating students on the societal impacts of technology a tentpole of his long-term strategic plan.

an interesting thing is that stanford sorta positioned itself as a great university to go to for undergrad compsci and technology really late--the shift came in 2007, which isn't that long ago relative to how long compsci has been a thing.

Stanford’s computer science department has long been revered for its graduate programs—Google was famously built as a research project by Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin—but the intense interest among undergrads is relatively new. In 2007, the school conferred more bachelor’s degrees in English (92) than computer science (70). The next year, though, Stanford revamped its CS curriculum from a one-size-fits-all education to a more flexible framework that funneled students along specialized tracks such as graphics, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. “We needed to make the major more attractive, to show that computer science isn’t just sitting in a cube all day,” Mehran Sahami, a computer science professor who once worked at Google, said later.

also, this feels kinda fucking weird?

In 2013, Stanford began directly investing in students’ companies, much like a venture capital firm.

they also sorta lucked out when they began to pump focus into undergrad compsci and tech: it coincided with the iphone, the explosion of facebook, and the beginning of the reinvention of the internet as we know it, basically:

The change in curriculum coincided with an explosion of wealth and perceived self-importance in the Valley. The iPhone opened up the potential for thousands of new businesses built around apps, and when its creator died he earned rapturous comparisons to Thomas Edison. Facebook emerged as the fastest-growing internet company of all time, and the Arab Spring made its influence seem benign rather than ominous. As the economy recovered from the recession, investors decided to park their money in startups like Uber and Airbnb that might one day become the next Google or Amazon. A 2013 video by the nonprofit Code.org featured CEOs, Chris Bosh, and will.i.am comparing computer programmers to wizards, superheroes, and rock stars.

and, unsurprisingly, the 2016 election is where stanford folks seem to have finally started realizing that there are a lot of issues with tech--or perhaps, they just couldn't ignore that possibility anymore even if deep down they recognized it the whole time? who knows. i suspect we'll be looking back on the 2016 election as one of those cultural inflection points in history where everything changed.

Matthew Sun had been on campus for only a few weeks when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The caustic 2016 political season, warped by misinformation and a Russian propaganda campaign of still-unknown scale, immediately recalibrated the narrative surrounding social media’s ability to connect people for good. “Freshman year was kind of when we woke up to a lot of the not-so-great stuff that was happening in the tech industry,” says Sun, who is now the president of CS + Social Good. “Ever since then, our perception has not really been the same.”

and it's all been downhill from there, of course.

The torrid pace of bad news has been jarring for students who entered school with optimistic views of tech. Nichelle Hall, a senior majoring in computer science, viewed Google as the ideal landing spot for an aspiring software engineer when she started college. “I associated it so much with success,” she says. “It’s the first thing I thought about when I thought about technology.” But when she was offered an on-site interview for a potential job at the search giant in the fall, she declined. Project Dragonfly, Google’s (reportedly abandoned) effort to bring a censored search engine to China, gave her pause. It wasn’t just that she objected to the idea on principle. She sensed that working for such a large corporation would likely put her personal morals and corporate directives in conflict. “They say don’t do evil and then they do things like that,” she says. “I wasn’t really into the big-company idea for that reason. … You don’t necessarily know what the intentions of your executives are.”

also this is just an objectively really bad idea for a lot of reasons:

Next year Californians will vote on a bill that would replace cash bail with a computerized risk-assessment system that calculates an arrested person’s likelihood of returning for a court appearance. The idea is to give people who can’t afford to make bail another way to get out of jail through a fairer policy.