A teaching site for the ethics of technology
Read through the science fiction that has been rehearsing these problems since Frankenstein.
Fiction has been stress-testing technology for two centuries
The premise is simple: science fiction has been stress-testing the ethics of technology for two centuries. Reading it carefully is one of the better ways to learn how to think about the technology you actually use.
The point is not to tell you what to think. It is to give you enough practice with the arguments that you know what you think, and why.
Stories
Branching dilemmas where the choices are yours and the consequences play out. Short fiction companions to every textbook chapter.
Analysis tools
An AI counselor for talking through an argument, a framework explorer that maps your answers onto ethical traditions, and perspective comparisons that surface the ones you missed.
Community
Submit your own dilemmas. Argue open positions in the debate arena. Other readers are working through the same questions, and their answers are part of the material.
Why this matters now
For most of history, a new technology arrived slowly enough that a culture could argue about it before living with it. That margin is gone. Systems that decide who gets a loan, what a child sees, which patients are flagged, and what counts as true are being deployed faster than our laws, our institutions, or our intuitions can keep up.
You don't get to opt out of those decisions — you live inside them. The only real choice is whether you can reason about them clearly. That's a skill, and like any skill it takes practice on hard cases before the stakes are personal.
AI makes consequential calls
Models now sit in the loop on hiring, lending, medicine, policing, and what billions of people read each day. Knowing how to interrogate those systems is no longer a specialist concern.
The pace outruns the rules
Law and norms are written after harm shows up. Fiction lets us rehearse the failure modes — surveillance, automation, engineered life — before they ship, while there is still room to choose.
Everyone is a participant
You generate the data, accept the defaults, and cast the votes that shape this. Ethical literacy is how a citizen, not just a regulator, holds technology to account.
Built for classrooms, but not limited to them
Undergrads, curious readers, anyone trying to think more clearly about the technology they use every day.