Seminar in the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Catalog description

The course provides an overview of the nature and scope of the ethical issues arising from AI-human interaction, together with the philosophical background (in ethics and philosophy of mind) that students need to develop an informed approach to these issues. Among the topics the course will typically address: fundamental ethical concepts, theories, and questions about moral agency, ethical reasoning, responsibility and autonomy; conceptual questions about the nature of intelligence; the philosophical scope and limits of computational, connectionist, and other models of mind; the relation of sapience to sentience; the notion of singularity and superintelligence; issues concerning AI-technology's human consequences, including impacts on employment, bias, harm and responsibility, privacy, the ethics of transhuman enhancement, and the prospects for a post- humanist ethics (e.g., robot rights, the ethics of human-robot interaction). Typically, the course material will comprise mainly theoretical texts (e.g. monographs, journal articles, textbook chapters), but may also integrate relevant literary or cinematic fiction.