The world’s leading STEM university has determined that what its computing research most urgently needs is not more engineers. It needs philosophers. Specifically, two of them, installed as “Co-Associate Deans of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing,” tasked with ensuring that MIT’s  AI algorithms incorporate virtuously-embraced habits of mind.

The initiative is called the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) — pronounced, one imagines, with a slight tremor of moral urgency. Its research agenda includes such pressing technical challenges as “Building Prosocial Machines,” “Chatbot Friends,” and, in what may be the most ambitious research program in the history of computer science, “The Computational Roots of Human Suffering”.

Overseeing this portfolio is newly appointed Co-Associate Dean Brian Hedden, a philosopher who spent a cloistered career in Australia pondering whether your future self is rationally obligated to agree with your past self — a question that, while gripping, has limited applications in, say, GPU design. MIT’s press release notes that his work addresses “the intersection of ethics, epistemology, and political philosophy.” The press release does not address what any of that has to do with writing code.

To be fair to Dr. Hedden, his published research actually demonstrates that most statistical “fairness metrics” used to detect algorithmic bias are mathematically incoherent. MIT has therefore appointed a man who proved that algorithmic fairness metrics don’t work to run MIT’s algorithmic fairness initiative.

There’s only one way out of this dilemma. Appoint MIT’s “Poet of Code,” Queen of the Algorithmic Justice League, as the third Co-Associate Dean of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing. Her lived experience as one of MIT’s celebrated DEI hires would add just the right touch.

Story suggested by MIT News