Activity 1.3: Who Computing Helps, and Who It Hurts

Computing Innovations

Who They Help, and Who They Hurt

Key Concepts

Every Effect Has Two Sides

Who Gets Left Out

Where Bias Comes From

A Computing Innovation

Anything that includes a program as part of how it works.

Not just apps. A pacemaker. A traffic light. A crop sensor.

This is the most heavily tested idea on the exam.

The Rule

Every innovation has beneficial effects and harmful effects.

Not some. Every one.

Usually the same feature causes both.

Same Feature, Both Effects

Maps knows where everyone is.

That is how it routes you around a traffic jam.

It is also how it knows where you were on Tuesday.

One capability. You cannot keep one half and drop the other.

Not Intended, Still Real

Nobody set out to make people worse at navigating on their own.

Harm does not require anyone to have wanted it.

"They did not mean to" is never the whole answer.

The Digital Divide

The gap between people who have reliable access to computing and people who do not.

Not only whether. Also how fast, how new, how often.

It Compounds

Homework moves online. Fine, if you have internet at home.

Job applications move online.

Benefits applications move online.

Each step is reasonable. The stack of them is not.

Bias

Software built by people, trained on data collected by people.

Both carry assumptions, and the program inherits them.

Three Places It Enters

The data — who is in it, and who is missing.

The design — what the builders assumed was normal.

The use — a fair tool pointed at unfair questions.

Crowdsourcing

Getting a lot of small contributions from a lot of people.

Wikipedia. Traffic reports. Mapping after an earthquake.

Powerful, and only as representative as who shows up.

Whose Work Is It

Code, images, music, and writing all have owners by default.

A license is the owner saying what you may do with it.

Open source is not "no rules." It is a specific set of them.

Which Includes You

Everything you build in this course is yours.

And anything you borrow gets credited, in a comment, every time.

That habit is worth points on the Create task in Quarter 3.

Today's Objectives

Identifying a computing innovation and its purpose
Describing a beneficial and a harmful effect of the same feature
Explaining the digital divide and how it compounds
Naming three places bias enters a system
Explaining why borrowed work gets credited

Key Terms

Computing innovation: Anything that includes a program as part of how it works.
Digital divide: The gap in access to computing between groups of people.
Bias: A systematic unfairness built into data, design, or use.
Crowdsourcing: Gathering many small contributions from many people.
License: A statement from an owner about what others may do with their work.

'F' → Fullscreen

Build

No code today either. Programming starts next session and does not stop.

Task 1: Pick One

Choose a computing innovation you personally use. Not a famous example — something you actually opened this week.

Name it, and say what its purpose is in one sentence.
What data does it collect? List everything you can think of.
Name one beneficial effect and one harmful effect.
The hard part: find a single feature that causes both. If your two effects come from unrelated features, keep looking.

Task 2: Take It Away

Same innovation. Imagine a person with no reliable internet at home and a phone five years old.

What can they still do with it?
What can they not?
If your school required it for homework, what would that person need to do to keep up?
Write down: is that a problem with the innovation, with the school, or with neither? Argue for your answer.

Task 3: Where Would Bias Get In

Take this one: a program that ranks job applicants by scoring their résumés. It learns what a good hire looks like from the résumés of people the company already hired.

Give one way bias could enter through the data.
Give one way it could enter through the design — what the builders assumed was normal.
Give one way it could enter through how it is used, even if the program itself is fine.
Write down: would testing the program on the company's existing employees reveal the problem? Say why or why not.

Task 4: Group — Three Rounds

In threes. One innovation per group, chosen by your teacher. Three minutes per round, then pass your sheet to the next group.

Round 1. List every benefit you can think of.
Round 2. Take the sheet you were passed. For each benefit on it, write a harm the same feature causes.
Round 3. Take the next sheet. Circle the one pairing you think is most serious, and write one sentence saying why.

Every group reads out their circled pairing. You will hear the same innovation described as obviously good and obviously harmful within about a minute of each other, which is the point.

Checkpoint

Define a computing innovation in one sentence.
Give an example of one feature that causes both a benefit and a harm. It cannot be the maps example.
Name the three places bias can enter a system.
Explain the digital divide to someone who has never heard the term, in two sentences.
Why does borrowed code get credited in a comment?

Reflection

Before today, would you have said the innovation you chose in Task 1 was mostly good, mostly bad, or neutral? Has that changed?
"They did not mean for that to happen." Is that a defense? Give your reasoning, not just your answer.
Starting next session you build programs of your own. Name one thing from today you would want to think about before releasing something you wrote.

Then do the question set below. It is five questions on a shared reading passage — the exact format of five questions on the AP exam, and the only place in this quarter you will practice it.