Understanding AI and Society

Catalog description

This course examines how recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies shape - and are shaped by - society. We will consider the role of AI across sectors including employment, medicine, mental health, education, and democracy, as well as across social functions including trust, privacy, autonomy, accountability, and fairness. We will move beyond simple sensationalist narratives for or against AI, and examine how different social science disciplines produce empirically-grounded studies of the impacts of AI. The course compares quantitative behavioral-social science (e.g., measurement, causal inference, surveys/experiments, audits and fairness metrics) with qualitative and interpretive approaches (e.g., ethnographic and historical studies, policy analysis, and critical perspectives from STS, law, and philosophy) to provide students with a broad toolkit through which to ask questions and evaluate emerging and future developments. Students will learn to reason about, and assess evidence related to, responsible development, deployment, and governance of AI in a variety of societal contexts.