AI Policy

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This is the undergrad version of CCTP-6041. New artificial intelligence systems that mimic and surpass human cognitive activity pose novel and profound ethical challenges. The purpose of this course is to give students an understanding of these current challenges and to provide them with the tools they will need to navigate the future controversies as the AI technologies and applications evolve. The course starts with an overview of artificial intelligence and its latest manifestations - generative AI and chatbots like ChatGPT. After a review of actual and proposed legal systems aimed at addressing the ethical and policy challenges of AI, the course then focuses on current active policy controversies including fairness, accountability and transparency, copyright and competition and national security and open-source models. The second section of the course focuses more narrowly on policy issues as they arise in AI use cases, including predictive scoring systems for credit granting and criminal justice, facial recognition, health care, autonomous vehicles and autonomous weapons. The final section deals with more speculative future questions, including how humans can find meaning in life when robots can do all the work and outperform humans in all fields; whether AI systems can achieve consciousness, independent agency and moral status; whether these systems could become superintelligent and create an existential risk to humanity; whether humans should merge with AI systems to overcome their biological limitations to become transhuman. The course will involve a constant interplay of theoretical reflection and practical problem-solving.