Event Timeslots (1)
Thursday
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This course provides a nontechnical introduction to contemporary AI systems and the philosophical and ethical issues they raise. We will begin by examining some of the classical questions at the intersection of philosophy and AI, including the computational theory of mind and the possibility of artificial thought. We will then turn to contemporary AI technologies, including deep neural networks (DNNs) and large language models (LLMs), developing an outline understanding of how they work, and the capabilities and limitations that follow from their underlying architecture. Armed with this understanding, we will then turn to the philosophical and ethical questions raised by these technologies and discuss such issues as the black-box problem, the right to explanation, automated influence, algorithmic fairness and bias, machine ethics and value alignment. By the end of the course students should have sufficient understanding of both the core philosophical concepts and AI technology to be able to precisely articulate the main philosophical and ethical problems surrounding AI, and to begin developing their views on how these problems should be tackled.