Tue, 08/31/2021
This post is a summary of Season 2, Episode 4 of The Nebraska Governance & Technology Center’s (NGTC) Podcast Series, Tech Refactored. In this episode, host NGTC Director Gus Hurwitz was joined by guest host and NGTC Research Associate Neil Rutledge. Together they sat down with Colton Harper of Broader Considerations of Technology (or BCT), a student organization that is part of the Kutak Ethics Center at Nebraska. BCT is launching several impressive initiatives, including data visualization workshops, and along with the NGTC, game jams and a science fiction and ethics book club.
Listening to Colton’s story I am struck by just how much a student can achieve with vision, a lot of hard work, and the support of the University of Nebraska. Colton is a third year PhD student in the UNL’s computer science program, applying computer science principles to biology. More specifically, his work applies telecommunication theory and information theory to analyze the communication between engineered biological cells that are in communication with one another, and how that communication breaks down in the context of cancer.
Over the course of his research, which has included the use of synthetic biology to modify the genetic code of cellular organisms, and thereby their characteristics, it has become very apparent to Colton the enormous power, both for use and misuse, that synthetic biology technologies present. That led him to begin to reckon with the ethical dimensions of synthetic biology, and technology more broadly - leading him down a road that would result in the creation of Broader Considerations of Technology.
Earlier in his life Colton had experienced how significant public-minded enterprises, from preparing tax returns for low income individuals to helping deliver community services can be, and he noticed that such service initiatives were something that was lacking in most computer science student organizations. While existing groups were very focused on professional development, Colton found in his conversations with other students that that did not reflect their underlying desire to serve - in fact they were very eager to do so. That led him to partner with other college students to teach robotics to kids from underserved communities, leading them to receive grant funding in order to further enable them to expand their work.
One of the program areas that the BCT and the NGTC are collaborating on this year is a sci-fi short story club, where students will be given the opportunity to read a science fiction short story that raises issues about the interaction between technology and society in advance of the meeting, and then discuss the story with like minded people who are sensitive to both the promises and perils of technology as well as its profound implications for society. One particularly exciting part of the initiative is that it is bringing together students and practitioners from a number of different disciplines who might intuitively approach these issues in different ways, to get a more informed sense of the ethical inflection points that others might identify with these technologies.
The BCT is also organizing a speaker series where they will be hosting speakers that engage with the general themes that are of concern to the organization - the first of those will be Dr. Christine Weisler from California State Polytechnic University, who will deliver an introduction to the different aspects of technology that relate to feminism and the philosophy of disability. The BCT will also be facilitating a program around the development of web apps, utilizing tools of digital storytelling to tell stories related to the now multiyear pandemic. One particularly cool aspect of this program is that there will be roles for students who are familiar with coding, but also students whose skills and interests might align more with the narrative storytelling aspect of the process - by putting those two together the BCT believes it can create some pretty compelling pieces that explore our collective and individual experiences of the pandemic.
In so doing Colton is sensitive not only to how data can be used to tell a more accurate story of phenomena like the pandemic, but how the selective use of data can actually obscure underlying truths. Colton uses the example of election maps that rely on a red and blue binary to express voting outcomes, which can obscure the internal nuances that actually reflect the ways that individuals are voting, for example within a state. A map that simply reflects states as being “red or blue” might make it seem as though the most salient breakdown within an electorate is geographic distribution across states, when in fact it may be something very different - for example whether a voter is from a rural or urban area, that is actually driving electoral outcomes.
And in these data visualization projects, BCT will be tailoring the student experiences based on the skillsets of the students within each team. For example, a design student might be instrumental to a team in that he can provide a rich, engaging visual environment, while a computer science student might be able to leverage her experience with coding to create the software architecture that provides the nuts and bolts that allow for the information to be represented in a certain way.
Finally, Colton has a long history of engaging with youth, empowering them to use technology and helping them discover, especially within marginalized communities, that there are opportunities for them to exercise agency with regard to their future, perhaps in a career in tech. Colton gives the example of teaching kids robotics - when he showed them how the robots worked and help them build prescription designs they were engaged, but where they really came alive was when they realized how much control they could exercise over the ways in which the robots themselves were designed, a process that gave them a feeling of ownership of the project and its outcomes. That is a perfect example of the kind of out of the box thinking, and confidence to challenge existing modalities, that is really at the heart of so much of the work that Colton has accomplished, both here at the University and beyond.
Tags: Tech Refactored Review
