Data and Artificial Intelligence Ethics

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In the last decade, the Big Data revolution and developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have both created promises and raised several ethical issues. Computational emerging technologies have fostered the achievement of apparent benefits, while at the same they seem to exacerbate social inequalities and threaten even our own existence as a species. In this course, we will discuss those ethical and societal issues related to the development of AI and Big Data that have direct andconcrete consequences on the way we perceive ourselves as persons, as members of society, andthe way we conceive our place as a species on this planet. These issues will be analyzed in lightof major ethical theories, but a special emphasis will be placed on virtue ethics. Recent works invirtue ethics are well positioned to make sense of the importance of our place as human beings onthis planet, but at the same time they can account for the indispensable roles that machines play inour environment.The course is divided in three main parts. In the first part, I will introduce the main ethicalframeworks, and in particular virtue ethics. In the second part, we will discuss AI. Societal andethical issues raised by AI include the threats posed to the existence of our species; whether weshould trust AI or we should find a way to build artificial agents with moral characteristics; whetherAI will do most of our jobs in the future and if this scenario is desirable. In the third part, we wil lfocus on selected issues concerning the Big Data revolution, such as how the autonomy of very complex algorithms can shape our lives in opaque ways and whether transparency is desirable; ifthe design of algorithms may hide bias leading to social inequalities; how algorithms are changing the way healthcare is provided.Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:1. define and sketch focal points of the virtue ethics and other relevant ethical theories.2 identify moral theories in arguments provided in support or in opposition to the use of certain AI-related and Big Data technologies3. compare different arguments and highlight strengths and weaknesses