Ethics Can’t Be a Side Hustle

 

Dear Brandeis community,

 

A few weeks ago, at the kindergarten parent social, I got into a discussion with some fellow parents about driverless cars. This is a topic that seems very present to many of us, and increasingly so lately—how ready are we, collectively, for this impending future when the cars do the driving for us. There are familiar lanes to this conversation, by now: why do we feel squeamish about computers when we happily let strangers drive us via Uber or Lyft; the vision of a road trip with a family playing cards in the back of a car, as though on a train; and of course, the ethical dilemmas that such cars provoke. That last is especially close to my heart, as head of school here at Brandeis, a school deeply concerned with teaching ethics. I have written about this topic before, noting my own discomfort at human lives measured in nanoseconds at percentages of likely deaths. Yet as Donna Orem, president of the National Association of Independent Schools, noted in a recent article on artificial intelligence in education, “The technology will evolve far before we have the opportunity to deal with the social and ethical issues it may provoke.”

 

This seems true, and yet I don’t think its truth absolves us as educators from attempting to wrestle with these social and ethical issues, and in particular from creating space for our students to do the same. Sandee Bisson, our CREATE space designer and facilitator, recently shared an article with me and Nicholas Cole-Farrell, our director of technology and making, on courses being developed at Stanford, MIT, NYU, and Harvard to address the ethics of tech. In addition to her work in CREATE, Sandee helps run our Ethical Creativity Institute each year, so these issues are close to her heart as well. The gist of the article is that these elite institutions are realizing they’re behind the eight ball; that they should be teaching people to center their work in ethical questions and practices as they are teaching them to code, rather than after the fact, or when concerns are raised.

 

I am borrowing the title of this week’s post from one by the designer Mike Monteiro of Mule Design, in which he argues that you can’t do “good” work on the weekend to make yourself feel better for helping design products in your normal job that are bad for the world. I couldn't agree more, which is why we put design instructors from the d.School at Stanford right next to rabbis on the schedule during the Ethical Creativity Institute—because we want our teachers putting the why in design thinking from the very beginning. We want our teachers designing curriculum that puts Jewish ethics at the center of the work—because we want our students to graduate understanding that ethics isn’t a side hustle. It's the whole game: this is our world, tikkun olamis our ethical duty, and we only get one life to fulfill it.

 

Wishing you all weekends (and weeks!) full of good work, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan