Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Catalog description

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the use of machines to do tasks that seem to require human intelligence and cognitive skills (thinking, natural language, inference, decision making etc.) The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence is the young branch of applied ethics that seeks to study the far-reaching and diverse ethical issues that arise with the widespread and rapid integration of AI technologies into various aspects of our lives. The challenge is that we are in an uncharted ethical territory with regard to AI: we need to radically adjust our existing ethical paradigms or introduce new ones as we experience and acquire a better grasp of the problems involved in AI-human interaction. A large portion of these issues reflect our concerns about the harm that the use and misuse of AI might cause for humanity. Such issues range from threats to individual privacy and freedom to wider social implications regarding economic justice and race and gender equality. However, as AI systems develop and attain higher levels of intelligence, questions about their moral status become more pressing. If these systems are capable of moral agency, then not only do they have responsibilities towards other moral agents like us, but they also have rights that we should respect in our conduct towards them. This course offers an overview of the nature and extent of the ethical issues arising from AI-human interaction as well as the philosophical background (particularly, in ethics and philosophy of mind) required to develop an informed methodology in approaching these issues, with the help of the flourishing literature on the subject.