Ai: Ethics, Policy, & Society

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are rapidly expanding across multiple domains, leading to significant debate about its ethical and societal impacts. Still a matter of debate is what appropriate legal and governance structures should be created to ensure the ethical design, development, deployment, and use of AI. Further complicating the debate is the question of which parties and stakeholders should contribute to creating AI governance structures and mechanisms. The course will explore pressing issues in ethics and policy, including transparency, privacy and surveillance, misinformation and disinformation, fairness, algorithmic bias (from both underlying data and modeling choices), justice, equity, trust, and labor practices and supply chains. These topics will be grounded in specific use cases often drawn from cutting edge topics in the news. Offered by Mechanical Engineering. May not be repeated for credit.