>I would wager that the average CS professor at a top school is significantly more well-read in history, ethics, and many other subjects than the "AI Ethics major" being proposed.
Wait, what? To become a professor you have to spend the vast majority of your time teaching and/or studying/producing research in your specific discipline. How do you reach the conclusion that someone who doesn't exclusively focus on a topic would be more well-read on it than someone who does?
It really depends on your basis of comparison here. I would prefer the opinion of a top CS professor. It is a very reasonable assumption that they are, like most other hyper intelligent and intellectually curious people who find time to do other things in their long lifespan despite working 60 hours/week, extraordinarily well-read. This is relative to the binge drinking undergrad who decides to become an AI Ethics major because the workload and intellectual rigor is lower than STEM and he knows he can easily get affirmative-actioned into a well-paying job micro managing software developers with moral high ground as soon as he graduates, which seems to be the convergence of the idiotic suggestions being made. Would I say that a top CS professor has more of a background studying ethics than a top ranking federal judge or a top ranking philosophy professor? No, I would not. I'll also mention that one's level of knowledge and life experience is a completely dichotomous issue from whether an individual is inclined to make "fair" or "unbiased" ethical judgments when given authority to do so.
As btilly is referencing above, you already have a clear example of what type of people this field will attract: people with poor intellectual ability and zero understanding of inefficient, large-scale bureaucracies, basic probability or statistics, or software systems, painting simple organizational ineptitude as deliberate malfeasance and racism with the intent of bolstering themselves and their social group financially. It's clear there is an issue and it needs to be addressed as a growing pain, but deliberately training moral police with power over the software industry may lead to something like a dark age in technology.
Wait, what? To become a professor you have to spend the vast majority of your time teaching and/or studying/producing research in your specific discipline. How do you reach the conclusion that someone who doesn't exclusively focus on a topic would be more well-read on it than someone who does?