There has been much uproar lately in Silicon Valley, April Glaser writes in an interesting piece in Slate. Employees at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, and others, have expressed disapproval of their companies' involvement with police surveillance, military technology, or refugee policy. Their efforts have apparently had an impact on corporate decisions.
The theme of CSTV's Design & Society course is "good design". When I ask students what this expression means, they tend to think, first of all, about technical matters, e.g., efficiency, cost, usability, and so on. However, as the course progresses, we come to ethical issues, e.g., is the design "good" for people, and in what sense?
Although the ethical aspect of good design has always been important, it is becoming ever more immediate. I think this is because fewer designs today are simply objects while more are really services.
The Communications of the ACM has an interesting short article on the rise of so-called social bots. A social bot is software that emulates a human being on social media. An example of a social bot would be a Twitter account that talks up Kanye West.