Social and ethical issues in information technology

Code 659AA
Credits 6

Learning outcomes

The progress in AI research makes it timely to focus not only on making AI more capable, but also on maximizing the societal benefit of AI [from Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence, an open letter]. This concern is by necessity interdisciplinary, because it involves both society and AI. It ranges from economics, law and philosophy to computer security, formal methods and, of course, various branches of AI itself. The course will be organized as a series of seminars on different hot topics. Contents may include:
• Philosophical implications of AI
o Technological limitations to Ai
o Biological limitations to human intelligence
• Economic impact of emerging technologies
o The disappearance of intellectual jobs
o The rise of the corporate colossus
o The power of data in the hands of big companies and auto-regulations (Partnership on AI)
• Legal and ethical issues
o Privacy, transparency, biases and fairness, data lock-in
o Autonomous vehicles and weapons
o Machines for human care and threats to human dignity: customer care, robot companions …
• Trustworthiness of the technologies
o Safety, robustness, and control
• Future scenarios
o Superintelligence implications