What is a Better Future?

MIT equips and encourages its students and researchers to develop technology for a better future. But what is a better future? How do we know what sort of future we should be designing and developing? Who decides, and how?
This course will provide students the opportunity to step back and ask and ask themselves what sort of future is worth building. Topics will include how technology can promote aims such as human dignity, rights, and justice, from the perspective of multiple ethical, philosophical, and spiritual frameworks.
The class will invite subject experts, representing technical fields that raise ethical questions, and ethical frameworks of both secular and religious varieties, to address the question: what does it mean to build a better future?   Guest subject experts will be interviewed by the course instructors and students will engage in weekly discussions. 

Projects

You will be required to complete a small and a large project for the course: a short conversation-based project mid-term, and a final project with a presentation.  The latter will address the intersection between a technological area of research at MIT that is of interest to the student, with at least one of the frameworks for values and ethics presented in the class, while thinking critically about how to shape a better future via that research.