Ethics and AI Technology

Catalog description

This course focuses on the ethical questions that come up in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. Speaking very roughly, the course seeks to address three primary ethical questions about AI: what can we do to AI, what can we do with AI, and what might AI do to us? We will examine questions like: could an AI have agency, consciousness, a mind, or the status of person, and how could we know if it did? Where does AI have the potential to help us (e.g., in medical diagnoses), and where does it have the potential to harm us (e.g., bias, autonomous weapons)? How might AI reshape basic dimensions of our humanity-our relationships, our ways of thinking, our aspirations?