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Quantum information science (QIS) is an emerging interdisciplinary field at the intersection of physics, computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics leveraging the laws of quantum mechanics to circumvent classical limitations on information processing. With QIS coursework proliferating across US institutions, including at the undergraduate level, we argue that it is imperative that ethics and social responsibility be incorporated into QIS education from the beginning. We discuss ethical issues of particular relevance to QIS education that educators may wish to incorporate into their curricula. We then report on findings from focus interviews with six faculty who have taught introductory QIS courses, focusing on barriers to and opportunities for incorporation of ethics and social responsibility (ESR) into the QIS classroom. Few faculty had explicitly considered discussion of ethical issues in the classroom prior to the interview, yet instructor attitudes shifted markedly in support of incorporating ESR in the classroom as a result of the interview process itself. Taking into account faculty's perception of obstacles to discussing issues of ESR in coursework, we propose next steps toward making ESR education in the QIS classroom a reality.
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Ethics and society review: Ethics reflection as a precondition to research funding
Researchers in areas as diverse as computer science and political science must increasingly navigate the possible risks of their research to society. However, the history of medical experiments on vulnerable individuals influenced many research ethics reviews to focus exclusively on risks to human subjects rather than risks to human society. We describe an Ethics and Society Review board (ESR), which fills this moral gap by facilitating ethical and societal reflection as a requirement to access grant funding: Researchers cannot receive grant funding from participating pro-grams until the researchers complete the ESR process for their proposal. Researchers author an initial statement describing their proposed research’s risks to society, subgroups within society, and globally and commit to mitigation strategies for these risks. An interdisciplinary faculty panel iterates with the researchers to refine these risks and mitigation strategies. We describe a mixed-method evaluation of the ESR over 1 y, in partnership with an artificial intelligence grant program run by Stanford HAI. Surveys and interviews of researchers who interacted with the ESR found100% (95% CI: 87 to 100%) were willing to continue submitting future projects to the ESR, and 58% (95% CI: 37 to 77%) felt that it had influenced the design of their research project. The ESR panel most commonly identified issues of harms to minority groups, inclusion of diverse stakeholders in the research plan, dual use, and representation in datasets. These principles, paired with possible mitigation strategies, offer scaffolding for future research designs.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2124734
- PAR ID:
- 10343840
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Volume:
- 118
- Issue:
- 52
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/2117261118
