Results for STS

The course introduces students to critical perspectives on the history, social context, epistemology, and ethics of science, technology, and medicine. The goal of the course is to learn about major concepts and methods from science & technology studies, introduced in the context of real-world issues. STS 1 is the required gateway course for the major in Science, Technology & Society, but is open to students from all departments and disciplines. A final paper will be required. There will be no final exam.

As we delegate more to artificial intelligence (AI) and integrate AI more in societal decision-making processes, we must find answers to how we can ensure AI systems are safe, follow ethical principles, and align with the creator's intent. Increasingly, many AI experts across academia and industry believe there is an urgent need for both technical and societal progress across AI alignment, ethics, and governance to understand and mitigate risks from increasingly capable AI systems and ensure that their contributions benefit society as a whole. Intro to AI Safety explores these questions in lectures with targeted readings, weekly quizzes, and group discussions. We are looking at the capabilities and limitations of current and future AI systems to understand why it is hard to ensure the reliability of existing AI systems. We will cover ongoing research efforts that tackle these questions, ranging from studies in reinforcement learning and computer vision to natural language processing. We will study work in interpretability, robustness, and governance of AI systems - to name a few. Basic knowledge about machine learning helps but is not required. View the full syllabus at http://tinyurl.com/42rb2sfv. Enrollment is by application only. Apply online at https://forms.gle/v8msM8nJ5FgeEHx1A by 9:00 PM PDT on Saturday, March 16, 2024.

As we delegate more and more societal responsibilities to Artificial Intelligence, we raise pressing ethical questions about what will happen if these systems aren't aligned with our values. Increasingly many AI experts across academia and industry believe there is an urgent need for both technical and societal progress across AI alignment, ethics, and governance to understand and mitigate risks from advanced AI systems and ensure that their contributions benefit humanity and the world. Intro to AI Alignment explores these questions in lectures and small discussion-based environments led by student facilitators with targeted readings, weekly quizzes and group discussions, and a small final project. After recapping recent advancements in AI development, we will start by exploring two sides of the AI alignment problem that prevent us from building AI systems that reliably understand and follow human-compatible values. Next, we'll discuss current harms from AI as well as risks that future systems could pose and arguments for and against the importance of various AI safety work. Finally, we will learn about existing AI safety technical research, efforts to implement policy and governance measures that reduce AI risk, and how you can personally contribute to AI safety. Basic knowledge about machine learning helps but is not required. Enrollment is by application only. View the full syllabus and apply online at https://linktr.ee/stanfordaialignment by Sunday, Dec 17, 2023 at 9:00 PM PST.

What role do science and technology play in the creation of a just society? How do we confront and redress the impact of racism and bias within the history, theory, and practice of these disciplines? This course invites students to grapple with the complex intersections between race, inequality, justice, and the STEM fields. We orient to these questions from an artistically-informed position, asking how we can rally the embodied practices of artists to address how we think, make, and respond to each other. Combining readings from the history of science, technology, and medicine, ethics and pedagogy, as well as the fine and performing arts, we will embark together on understanding how our STEM practices have emerged, how we participate today, and what we can imagine for them in the future. The course will involve workshops, field trips (as possible), and invited guests. All students, from any discipline, field, interest, and background, are welcome! This course does build upon the STS 51 series from 2020-21, though it is not a prerequisite for this course. Please contact the professor if you have any questions!

Are humans fundamentally symbiotic organisms who cannot exist apart from the rest of earthly life? Should humans try to alter their physiology in order to inhabit other planets? Or might the ultimate purpose of human existence be to leave organic biology behind entirely? This course explores a range of competing contemporary claims concerning the nature and future of humanity. It begins by reviewing the efforts of mid-20th century cybernetics to reconceive human beings as "complex information processing systems." It then traces how this redefinition has led to the development of several competing camps: an ecological wing that views human beings as complex systems that must achieve environmental homeostasis; a posthumanist wing that stresses the radical plasticity and adaptability of human organisms; and a transhumanist wing that seeks to unleash the potential of human information processes on a cosmic scale. Participants will have the opportunity to survey the scientific foundations of each position and debate their ethical and political implications.

The world is changing in contradictory ways. Emerging technology, the evolving geopolitical economy, and ecological challenges present opportunities but also cascading risks. The pathway from our current destructive and extractive economy towards a more regenerative economy is unclear. There is a stark tension between gigascale opportunities such as AI, fusion energy, nanotech, quantum tech, space colonization, and biomanufacturing on the one hand, and degrowth necessities such as rethinking growth and using less resources on the other. This tension is steeped in political choices constrained by industrial power dynamics and conditioned by inequality. To what extent do visions and incentives align across industry, government, and social movements? What would the choice to scale or descale entail in each case - and are they mutually exclusive? The course introduces empirically driven systems thinking with in-depth modules on both emerging tech and degrowth, and scenario-based tech foresight. We combine the tools of technology foresight, gaming, scenarios, speculative fiction, and worldbuilding, exploring and assessing utopian or dystopian trends, visions, and projects (e.g. the Eden project, biomanufacturing at scale, smart cities, the Metaverse, generation spaceships, space colonization, human longevity, mega-disruptive startups, global health governance, radical longtermism, and religious `heavens'). The goal of the course is to gain clarity on the innovation boundaries within which the next 50 years might develop. The course prepares students to become disruptors of governance principles, strategies, and leadership of corporations, philanthropies, economies, and civilizations.

By framing video games as complex sociotechnical systems, this course works to reveal the threads of identity, power, and politics present throughout the video games that, in turn, configure players and play. Although the primary 'texts' of the course will be video games themselves, we will intersect these readings with work in STS, the Philosophy of Technology, and constellated fields to draw out the deeper social orders video games reproduce, amplify, and challenge. Material understanding will be evaluated via discussion, debate, written assessments, and a final conceptual design of a video game.

The global risk environment is changing. Seemingly distinct large-scale risks affect what we now realize are mutually interdependent human, socio-technical, and ecological systems. As a result, consequences are more catastrophic, and costs are set to accelerate. How do we determine the top risks of this decade to prioritize actions, and how are both risks and actions likely to evolve and interact? This course investigates the data, methods, and insights mobilized by key actors such as corporations, governments, and academics to assess systemic risk, create future scenarios, and generate predictions. What are the track records of recognized systemic risk assessment and modeling toolkits? Going forward, how can we get better at risk prevention and mitigation? This year, the course will focus on combined risks from the environmental, health, and emerging tech domains. The key objective is to quickly learn relevant vocabularies (risk, tech, and futurist) by engaging with both traditional and emerging assessment methods, in order to discover how to shape positive societal outcomes in the next decade and beyond. The course prepares students for key roles in the assessment, management, and prediction of risks, technologies, markets, industries, infrastructures, and futures. People with these skills can affect the governance principles, strategies, and leadership of corporations, philanthropies, states, economies, and entire societies.

For millennia, an apocalypse has been just around the corner. This course examines how expectations surrounding the end of the world - and the role that human beings might play in bringing it about - have transformed over the last two centuries. After a brief look at traditional religious apocalypticism, we explore how apocalypse came to be reconsidered as an entirely this-worldly phenomenon that falls within human power to achieve and demands political attention. Along the way, the course addresses the discovery of entropy in the 19th century, development of the hydrogen bomb in the mid-20th, and the planetary science that has transformed the Apocalypse into a primarily ecological concern over the last half-century.

How does Artificial Intelligence construct and reinforce social orders? How do human biases, values, and cultures shape AI? Starting with a descriptive introduction to different types and kinds of algorithms, we will first establish what AI is and what it does, on a technical level. With this shared framework in mind, we will then investigate how AI shapes, and is shaped by social interactions and imaginaries. Through scholarly works in the digital humanities, philosophy, internet studies, engineering, and popular culture, AI's influence on public perception, privacy, morality, popularity, equity, and justice will be critically examined. This course will feature guest lectures from controls engineers and others involved in using AI to protect science, technology, and society. Performance in this course will be evaluated through a data journalism project that asks students to peek behind the shiny User Interfaces of popular websites and identify how the code exerts power over various actors in the network.

This course will examine our everyday food practices as a site of politics where culture, technology, history, and issues of ethics and justice intersect. Through a survey of academic, journalistic, and artistic works on food and eating, the course will explore a set of key analytical frameworks and conceptual tools in STS, such as the politics of technology, classification and identity, the reproduction of inequality, ethical and responsible innovation, and nature/culture boundaries. The topics covered include: the industrialization of agriculture; globalization and local foodways; food justice and ethics; new technologies in food practices (e.g., biotechnology, delivery apps); health and diet trends; and food and global challenges (e.g., climate change, COVID-19). Through food as a window, the course intends to achieve two broad intellectual goals. First, students will explore various theoretical and methodological approaches in STS and related fields (e.g., anthropology, history, sociology). Second, students will develop a set of basic skills and tools for their own critical thinking and empirical research, and design and conduct independent research on a topic related to food.

This seminar introduces key analytical approaches and methodologies in the interdisciplinary field of STS, as well as basic tools for designing and conducting original research in STS and related social sciences. Students survey a series of influential studies that examined the intersection of science, technology and society; identify productive questions of their own interest; and explore how to pursue them through strong research design. By completing smaller writing assignments throughout the quarter, you will produce a fully developed research proposal as final assignment. This final proposal can serve as an honors prospectus for students who seek to participate in the STS honors program. First week attendance is mandatory.

Independent research. Student develops own project with supervision by an STS faculty affiliate. Students must email Prof. Edwards with brief project description and name of faculty supervisor. May be repeated for credit.

Every unit of credit is understood to represent three hours of work per week per term and is to be agreed upon between the student and the faculty member. Instructor consent required. Please contact the department for a permission number.

Students obtain internship in a relevant research or industrial activity to enhance their professional experience consistent with their degree program and area of concentration. Prior to enrolling students must get internship approved by the STS Program Director. At the end of the quarter, a one-page final report must be supplied documenting work done and relevance to degree program. Meets the requirements for Curricular Practical Training for students on F-1 visas. Student is responsible for arranging own internship. Limited to declared STS majors only. Course may be repeated twice. Instructor consent required. Please contact the department for a permission number.

The Science Technology and Society (STS) Program has a student journal, Intersect, that has been publishing STS student papers for a number of years. This course involves learning about how to serve as an editor of a peer-reviewed journal, while serving as one of the listed editors of Intersect. Entirely operated online, the journal uses a work-flow management to help with the submission process, peer-review, editing, and publication. Student editors learn by being involved in the publishing process, from soliciting manuscripts to publishing the journal's annual issue, while working in consultation with the instructor. Students will also learn about current practices and institutional frameworks around open access and digital publishing.

The technosphere - the global sum of all infrastructure - metabolizes energy, materials, and information to feed human consumption. It runs on fossil fuels and solar energy, metabolized through such processes as photosynthesis (agriculture), photovoltaics, wind, and hydroelectric power. The technosphere also metabolizes information, ingesting some kinds of data as inputs and producing other data as outputs. Techno-metabolism's waste products, such as greenhouse gases, plastics, and nuclear waste, are currently transforming the atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, with radically different effects on disparate peoples and places. Scientists, historians, engineers, and others have proposed new ways to conceptualize techno-metabolism, seeking to reduce its energy requirements and material waste. Students will develop creative ways to visualize, understand, and change the interplay of energy, materials, and information to respond to environmental crises in the Anthropocene era.

From texts to techne, from artifacts to discourses on science and technology, this course is an examination of how Black people in this society have engaged with the mutually consitutive relationships that endure between humans and technologies. We will focus on these engagements in vernacular cultural spaces, from storytelling traditions to music and move to ways academic and aesthetic movements have imagined these relationships. Finally, we will consider the implications for work with technologies in both school and community contexts for work in the pursuit of social and racial justice.

This course explores the social construction of scientific knowledge from various perspectives. The course begins by taking stock of core philosophical theories on scientific knowledge and then it proceeds to ask how various authors have described and characterized this knowledge as socially embedded and constructed. Through this course we will ask what sort of knowledge is considered scientific or not? And then from there, a variety of social, institutional and historical factors will enter and influence not only how scientific knowledge is discovered and developed, but also how we evaluate it. This course is suitable to advanced undergraduates and doctoral students.

This course explores the way humans engage with technoscience through their bodies. Science and biomedicine constantly inform how we understand and approach our bodies, and we routinely integrate technology into our bodies whenever we wear glasses or smartwatches, take medications, or drive. Importantly, technological artifacts and scientific knowledge themselves embody and negotiate human values and politics. We examine the dynamic and intricate interplay of the body, the technical, and the social through the analysis of a variety of domains: from communication, VR and AI to gender, race, and disability to healthcare, pollution, and disasters. The readings address such conceptual lenses as the politics of design, biopower, health and environmental justice, ethical and responsible innovation, cyborgs, and hybridity. Ultimately, we interrogate what kinds of societies and futures we are creating through our practices involving technoscience and the body.

This is a required monthly meeting for STS Honors students.

For students in the STS Honors program. Every unit of credit is understood to represent three hours of work per week per term and is to be agreed upon between the student and the faculty member. May be repeated for credit.