Computer science students must be taught to consider social effects

At least in the UK S students are required to be taught these issues as part of their professional development. This is mandatory for a course to be accredited by the British Computer Society, However to quote an old saying "you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink". Once a student has graduated and is working, there is little you can do if the person does not follow whatever they were told. You mentioned the Hippocratic oath. In medicine professional registration is required to practice, and can be struck off if they are found to have failed to follow professional standards. Possibly this could be applies to "IT" professionals. However securing agreement from govt and industry tha tthey will only employ registered staff might take time. The other challenge is that unlike the mathematical foundations the principles you are concerned with are subjective and when there is no rigorous definition of "intelligence" let alone "AI" arguments about harm to society are going to be difficult to sustain - if/when they end up in court.

Quite correct, most if not all UK universities want BCS accreditation for their Computer Science courses, and to get that you have to teach your students ethics. I have the honour of delivering that module to our students, and find it's a "Marmite Module" - students either thoroughly enjoy batting around ideas and revel in a class that doesn't have right and wrong answers, just well-argued points of view, or they hate it and want to get back to their code as fast as their legs will carry them. They all have to not only take but actually pass this module to get their degrees, however. Ah well, must get back to marking their work...

Unfortunately, NEU and Khoury College that have supposedly "strive[d] to integrate ethics across the curriculum" have not. This is a vague unproven statement. Worse, Ms. Mynatt wrote the Oath all by herself without input from anyone (especially NOT students!) and she holds no particular accreditation in ethics. Coercing students to recite the Oath without buy-in amounts to compelled speech and should not be set forth as an example of how Universities should proceed. By contrast, the Engineering Dept. at NEU has gotten it right. The inclusion in the Society of Engineers with it's Oath is opt-in only and not forced on students at such an important time as graduation.

As the Senior Associate Dean of Academic Programs and Student Experiences for Khoury College, I championed taking Dean Mynatt’s original ideas for the oath to weave it throughout our curricular programs and experiential learning opportunities. It is a powerful guiding light that connects the many ways Northeastern students engage in computer science education, reaffirming our special obligation to safety, security, privacy, and creating equitable opportunities—responsibilities that are more critical now than ever. Learn more about our oath here: https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/about/mission-and-vision/

But who wrote the Oath? And who should have? Why can't it be implemented as the Engineering college has? Where is the "ethics across the curriculum"? You have added no new info. It's just more assertions of the same.

As a co-op school, NEU (and thus Khoury College) has 100s of industry partners. What is NEU/Khoury doing to "affirm their [industry partners] special obligation to safety, security, privacy and creating equitable opportunities" with those industry partners?

As a colleague of Dean Mynatt for over a decade, I can indeed attest that the oath has had input from many people -- students, fellow academic colleagues, and industry. As her former PhD Student, she would frequently engage our lab (including bachelor, master, and PhD students) on aspects of the oath, eliciting feedback and discussion. As for aspects of the oath -- we operationalized this in our lab ethos (e.g., publishing on when we found latent biases in the computational research and why illuminating those biases were important). I am proud of these efforts and as an industry-based researcher, I have worked to deepen the components of this oath in my own lab culture. I applaud the entire Khoury College for their efforts and am excited to see more people in the computing sector put this critical and public focus onto our obligations and responsibilities associated with the human impacts of the technologies that we design, build, and launch into the world.

Doesn't seem like the rigorous and formal process one might expect from a well-known academic institution such as Northeastern. Other more prestigious Universities such as MIT and Stanford have a transparent, formal process. I guess NEU is content to be second tier. *Northeastern even has it's own Ethics Institute in-house which Khoury College seems to have passed over in favor of "water-cooler" discourse.