Alina Tugend, The New York Times;Colleges Grapple With Teaching the Technology and Ethics of A.I.
"At the University of Washington, a new
class called “Intelligent Machinery, Identity and Ethics,” is being
taught this fall by a team leader at Google and the co-director of the
university’s Computational Neuroscience program.
Daniel
Grossman, a professor and deputy director of undergraduate studies at
the university’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and
Engineering, explained the purpose this way:
The
course “aims to get at the big ethical questions we’ll be facing, not
just in the next year or two but in the next decade or two.”
David
Danks, a professor of philosophy and psychology at Carnegie Mellon,
just started teaching a class, “A.I, Society and Humanity.” The class is
an outgrowth of faculty coming together over the past three years to
create shared research projects, he said, because students need to learn
from both those who are trained in the technology and those who are
trained in asking ethical questions.
“The
key is to make sure they have the opportunities to really explore the
ways technology can have an impact — to think how this will affect
people in poorer communities or how it can be abused,” he said."
