{"id":448249,"date":"2026-08-30T19:12:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T19:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/448249\/"},"modified":"2026-08-30T19:12:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T19:12:11","slug":"in-the-ai-era-college-students-must-grapple-with-digital-ethics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/448249\/","title":{"rendered":"In the \u2018AI era,\u2019 college students must grapple with digital ethics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aug. 30, 2026 7 AM PT <\/p>\n

To the editor: As the creator and instructor of the AI ethics class at USC mentioned in this article, I welcomed Jaweed Kaleem\u2019s reporting on the rise of digital ethics and humanities courses embedded in AI majors and minors and other programs (\u201cUSC and UCLA bet big on AI to meet soaring student, job market demands,\u201d<\/a> Aug. 27).<\/p>\n

Since I began teaching classes in the ethics of technology in 2017, topics that were at the time interesting if mainly academic have become increasingly realistic. Those topics include fully autonomous lethal weapons, personal relationships with chatbots and ubiquitous surveillance. In the AI era \u2014 if that\u2019s what we\u2019re in \u2014 universities must expose students to values other than efficiency and technical performance.<\/p>\n

Students urgently need courses that invite them to investigate whether the benefits and harms of these powerful technologies are fairly distributed across society and to imagine futures where technology broadly promotes flourishing human lives. I\u2019ve found that my students appreciate the importance of these topics as they prepare to begin their professional lives.<\/p>\n

Elisa Warford, Woodland Hills
This writer is a professor of technical communication practice in the Engineering in Society Program at USC\u2019s Viterbi School of Engineering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aug. 30, 2026 7 AM PT To the editor: As the creator and instructor of the AI ethics…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":448250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[177479,177481,4371,70694,177478,2072,2172,177480,48,52,51,47,50,49,5659,177483,464,177482,1970,48938,3533],"class_list":["post-448249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ai-era","tag-ai-major","tag-chatbot","tag-college-student","tag-digital-ethic","tag-editor","tag-engineering","tag-humanity-course","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-minor","tag-personal-relationship","tag-society","tag-technical-performance","tag-technology","tag-topic","tag-usc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}