A summer Course about Ethics and Epistemology of Artificial Intelligence offered by TU Berlin!
TU Berlin offers students from the ENHANCE Alliance the opportunity to participate in a summer course on the topic of Ethics and Epistemology of Artificial Intelligence which doesn’t require prior knowledge or skills. Some online activities are organised and the peak of the course will be an in-presence week in Berlin from 1 to 5 May 2023. The students interested in seeing the systemic, social, and technical implications of AI have until 19 March to register on TUB’s page here.
A course to answer modern questions
The objective of the course is to decode values, assumptions, and stereotypes surrounding AI artefacts by (re)coding them and examining their impact on people and on the world. It proposes a qualitative self-experiment and highlights three questions, related to three AI tools: How does Replika challenge and change social relationships? Can Happify Health really improve your mental states? What is ChatGTP’s impact on knowledge management?
If the in-person week composed of workshops and supervised self-study sessions will take place at the beginning of May, the course starts with an online onboarding session either on 29 March or 19 April and after the week in Berlin participants will work on a project. There will be a period of online consultations from 10 May to 21 June on Wednesdays between 12 and 16, and the online scientific poster is scheduled on 5 July. The dates of the project submission and a voluntary presentation at an exhibition at the Free University of Berlin are not fixed yet but certainly will be soon.
An interdisciplinary organisation about technology and ethics
The course will adopt innovative, experimental, and interdisciplinary approaches by establishing a collaboration between the Computer Science, Engineering Science, and Philosophy of Technology departments. It will also propose both theoretical and practical approaches at the intersection of ethics and technology, in this case with a focus on AI. The students will learn to critically assess the relationship between technology and society and to analyse their interactions from an ethical perspective. They will also deconstruct the concept of neutrality of technology and learn to critically assess it, without ever forgetting the sustainability perspective in the applications of technology. In the end, the participants will have the necessary theoretical foundations stemming from both computer science (more specifically AI) and ethics.
These skills and knowledge will be put into practice and deepened after the in-presence week through case-based projects carried out in interdisciplinary groups. The goals will be to address the current challenges encountered through the use of AI technologies in different fields of applications and discuss different implementations and possible avenues of research that could enable the development of ethically acceptable AI systems.
The ENHANCE Alliance is very happy to offer this course from its partner to all its students and to give them the opportunity to share an international experience and learn more about the strong link between ethics and AI.
