Welcome to week 1

Welcome to this fourth and last week of our course. This week, we will bring together the various lines of the past three weeks by introducing you to the ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Probably AI is the most widely discussed technology at this time. With implications in very many fields, ranging from health care to education and from sustainability to law. Moreover, AI has relations to everything that we have been discussing so far. First of all, AI raises fears that technology will overrule humans, which is connected to themes in the classical philosophy of technology that have a central place in the first week. Second, AI can be seen as a mediator.

It plays a central role in human practices and decisions by helping us to understand the world around us. And by the artificial forms of agency that it possesses. Third, AI raises many ethical questions regarding its design and also regarding its social implications. We study AI from various angles. After discussing what the technology entails and what it can do, we will investigate how AI systems are affecting our society. We also discuss various ethical frameworks that have been developed to evaluate this impact of AI. Roos de Jong will do so by building on her work for the Rathenau Institute for Parliamentary Technology Assessment. And she will mainly address also the political dimensions of Artificial Intelligence.

And I will build on my work for the UNESCO World Commission for the Ethical Science and Technology, and also the UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. And by doing so, we hope to bring together all lines of the course over the past weeks. And we really hope that you will enjoy this last week as much as you hopefully did the first three.