ethics, data, and technology
course description
This course will explore philosophical issues surrounding the development and deployment of emerging technologies, focusing especially on technological advances based on “deep learning” techniques in computer science. The primary focus will be on ethical and explanatory questions surrounding the use of these systems, which in just a few years have come to have pervasive effects in our daily lives—despite the fact that our understanding of their philosophical implications remains rudimentary. Questions we will explore are: in what senses are these systems biased, and when is their bias ethically problematic? Can we explain the workings of these vastly complex systems—containing billions of parameters and trained on Internet-scale datasets—in a way that answers to our existing scientific, legal, and ethical practices? Who is responsible when these systems err? And finally: how can humanity adjust to the radical changes these systems are bringing to our social, political, and economic lives without losing our fundamental humanity, and can these systems be designed in a way to align with human values—as opposed to alien, machine objectives?