Lecturer: Heike Felzmann
Fields: Artificial Intelligence, Ethics
Content
The rapid development of digital technologies and more recently AI has changed our personal, professional and societal practices in ways that open up opportunities, but also come with risks. In this course we are going to discuss ethical concerns related to these developments with the help of selected ethical concepts and relevant examples.
Unit 1: We will begin with a discussion of how values are embedded in technologies and how this can be taken into account in technology development, considering the responsibilities of the technology developer. We will then reflect on privacy and consent to explore whether privacy is obsolete and how we can think about privacy in a rapidly changing information environment in which we are leaving a constantly expanding digital footprint.
Unit 2: We will begin by looking at datafication, the transformation of human actions and experiences into data, and the ethical significance of drawing inferences from such data. We will discuss the problem of algorithmic bias and challenges arising when decision-making is handed over to algorithms and artificial intelligence, addressing problems of transparency, algorithmic governance and accountability.
Unit 3: We will begin by discussing the close relation between surveillance, personalised services and the exercise of power in the digital sphere and will then reflect on Zuboff\’s theory of surveillance capitalism with regard to problems of human freedom and manipulation. We may also consider emerging risks of market concentration in AI.
Unit 4: This unit focuses on the tension between potential benefits and risks of AI. We will discuss the potential impacts of human replacement by AI, relating to increasing human-AI interaction, the rise of synthetic media, and the replacement of human labour by AI. We will also reflect on the sustainability of AI and will finish by considering whether we should be worried about existential risk of AI.
Literature
- Crawfoed, K. (2022). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.
- Markus Dubber, Frank Pasquale & Sunit Das (Eds.). (2021). The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI. Oxford Handbooks
- Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin’s Press.
- High-Level Expert Group on AI (2019). Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/ethics-guidelines-trustworthy-ai
- Nissenbaum, H. (2009). Privacy in context: Technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford University Press.
- Turing Institute (2023) AI Fairness in Practice, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.14636
- Vallor, S. (2024). The AI Mirror.
- Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Profile Books.
Lecturer
Heike Felzmann is an Associate Professor in Ethics in the School of History and Philosophy and affiliated with the Data Science Institute at the University of Galway. Her current research focuses on ethical issues in AI and robotics. She has published widely in the field and also has extensive experience of participation in European research projects, including on ethical aspects of data management, social robots and wearable robots.
Affiliation: University of Galway
Homepage: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/our-research/people/history-and-philosophy/heikefelzmann/