Welcoming Embedded EthiCS

We are excited to announce that Harvard’s Embedded EthiCS program has recently relocated its home to the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics. We welcome Embedded EthiCS Program Director Matt Kopec and the rest of the team to the Center! 

Embedded EthiCS started in 2017 as the brainchild of Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences Emerita Barbara Grosz, leading scholar in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, and Center Faculty Committee member and Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy Alison Simmons. Profs. Grosz and Simmons were motivated by the disparity between the level of impact Harvard’s computer science (CS) alums would likely have on the world and the relative lack of training these students were receiving on how to navigate the inevitable ethical concerns they’d face after graduation. The goals of the program have thus been to foster critical reflection, generate constructive discourse, and engender a responsible design mindset among tomorrow’s tech leaders. The program does this by embedding short modules on the social and ethical implications of digital technologies into courses across the CS curriculum.

What started as a pilot of just four modules has grown into a robust educational program that is now the cornerstone of how responsible computing is taught at Harvard. To date, the program has run 195 modules across 65 distinct CS courses, reaching over 10,000 students at Harvard College (and many more through Harvard’s Extension School). The approach has spread to other top CS schools like Stanford and Toronto, and, in tech education circles, it regularly serves as an example of an educational intervention that can be quickly deployed and nimbly evolve to keep pace with technological development. 

The program’s move to the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics is an especially exciting development at this particular moment, given the economic and social upheaval that advanced AI systems are already bringing. Embedded EthiCS is rushing to expand its programming, both to spark new interest in AI safety research among more of Harvard’s top minds and by embedding ethics education into Harvard’s rapidly growing AI-driven entrepreneurship ecosystem, all made possible through the Center’s administrative support and connections across campus. And as AI transforms our relationships, political discourse, and professions, the Center will benefit from the expertise of the Embedded EthiCS team as we collectively chart a measured and reasonable course through these exciting yet unnerving times. 

We’re thrilled by this new partnership and look forward to all the transformative work we’ll do together in the coming years!