PHIL 206 Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

This course is an introduction to the ethics of artificial intelligence and automated information systems. The recent development of transformer models, including large language models like ChatGPT, has brought to the fore urgent questions about how we must understand, classify, and react to artificially intelligent systems. Learners will learn foundational aspects about AI, including what it means for machines to think and best current understanding of machine abilities to emote, create, imagine, and so on. On the basis of this understanding the course will delve into a critical examination of a range of ethical questions raised by recent developments in AI, including issues pertaining to job losses due to automation, privacy, algorithmic bias and discrimination, transparency, self-driving cars and autonomous drones, copyright infringement, attribution of agency.