Dr Kate Vredenburgh, Dr Ali Boyle, Professor Alex Voorhoeve & Dr Paola Romero

We are in the midst of an AI revolution. AI is now embedded in our day-to-day lives, influencing the videos and text we see online, elections and social movements, what we buy, and how we work.

Ethics has often been the last step in the design and deployment of AI technologies. However, new and pending regulations, activism by civil society and self-governance efforts by companies have sought to integrate values like fairness, safety, and privacy into AI systems from the start. How successful have those attempts been? And how can we do better?

In this course, you will be introduced to the core ethics concepts needed to build better technology and analyse its impact on the economy, politics, and our social lives. In the first half of the course, you will consider ethical questions raised by the technology itself. Questions include:

• Can there be intelligent artificial systems? How will we know when we’ve succeeded?
• What is privacy, and should new technologies like genAI respect privacy or intellectual property rights?
• Can AI discriminate? If so, what are promising strategies for promoting fairness and mitigating algorithmic bias?
• Can we understand black-box AI systems? Why is it morally important that we do so?

In the second half of the class, we consider ethical questions raised by the use of AI in education, art, social media, politics and the economy. Questions include:

• How central is consent to privacy? Should we hold companies to a higher, or a different, standard?
• Can AI systems create art? Who should reap the rewards of AI-generated art? And do we need new artistic standards to judge it?
• Will AI enhance, or undermine, human wellbeing?
• How should AI change how we work, and how income and wealth are distributed?