Ethics and Artificial Intelligence

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Not so long ago, an engineer at Google claimed that a chatbot called LaMDA has achieved consciousness. While it may be doubtful whether this chatbot actually achieved consciousness, the chorus of technologists who believe artificial intelligence models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder. The most recent iteration of a chatbot called ChatGPT was able to pass exams from law and business schools. It took ChatGPT no less than 2 months to reach 100 million users. (For comparison, reaching 100 million users took the mobile phone 16 years, Facebook 4 years, and TikTok a year.) Truly, we are witnessing a revolution in time lapse that increasingly confuses the boundary between reality and science fiction. In this class, we shall embark on an adventure exploring the maybe not so fictional idea of an emerging consciousness in artificial intelligence and investigate the opportunity and risk potential of using AI for our society at large. Come to class and have a conversation with the future!