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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I've been designing a CS ethics class for the past few months, mostly as a personal challenge. I proposed it to a few professors in my department yesterday.

The responses I got were mostly variants of "not until they make us," which is exactly the kind of attitude that results in our present state of affairs (thinking of the BMW emissions controversy, Uber, &c). I don't want another major teachable scandal to come out of the tech world, but that may be what it takes.

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Sounds like they don't have the authority to do it. Perhaps pitch it to the business school Ethics professor, who perhaps might be willing to sign a letter of support.

Then take that to the authority. I believe it's the dean or provost of the CS department who would have the authority to make changes to the program -- and it is usually on a review cycle (so they might tell you to wait).

I think it's great what you've started, and so if all else fails -- put it on Coursera or open source it.

Thanks for the advice. I was planning to ask for support from the Philosophy department, but getting it from another school that has a practical ethics requirement is also a good idea.

The professors I talked to referred me to the department chair, who I think has final say over new courses here. Either way, open sourcing it would be fantastic (an entire section is devoted to ethical questions in IP/open source development).

It was VOLKSWAGEN --NOT BMW-- that created the emissions scandal by programming their cars to change the engine running parameters when the detected the conditions of the emissions test.

first article found of 641000 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34324772

BMW is actually doing it right http://www.bmwblog.com/2016/02/16/top-five-current-diesel-bm...

sheesh

(edit: add BMW story link)

That's not true, All car manufacturers were pulling tricks in order to save adBlue.

The BMW story is on a bmw blog...

Here you can see other emissions, in a Guardian article, where it's clearly to be seen that BMW does not comply to the EURO 6 norms.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/21/all-top-sel...

Perhaps the Guardian story is true and everyone is playing around the margins on the European tests, but that's trying to obscure the forest with one tree.

In the actual context of the comment, which is the the USA "emissions controversy" with the massively fraudulent code, it was VOLKSWAGEN that was the main player, BMW was not involved.

(also IMO, Diesels are a pretty bad way to burn fuel in any case; I don't think BMW should pursue it at all, and although I like my petrol-powered model, I wouldn't buy one of their diesels)

Sorry, I misremembered. I tried to correct it above, but it's too late for me to edit.

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