711-0116/02 – Ethical questions of artificial intelligence (EOUI)
Gurantor department | Department of Social Sciences | Credits | 2 |
Subject guarantor | prof. Dr. Mgr. Tomáš Hauer | Subject version guarantor | prof. Dr. Mgr. Tomáš Hauer |
Study level | undergraduate or graduate | Requirement | Choice-compulsory type B |
Year | 1 | Semester | winter + summer |
| | Study language | Czech |
Year of introduction | 2018/2019 | Year of cancellation | |
Intended for the faculties | FMT, FS | Intended for study types | Follow-up Master, Bachelor |
Subject aims expressed by acquired skills and competences
Students completing the course will be able to:
- Effectively use basic methodological approaches in ethics;
- To understand the basic ethical concepts;
- Ethically justify ours decisions in cases in which engineers and technicians are insufficient everyday moral intuitions.
- Assess the legitimacy of ethical arguments in solving conflict situations;
- Identify your own strengths and weaknesses in the present solutions ethical dilemma.
Teaching methods
Seminars
Tutorials
Project work
Summary
Over the course of about fifty years of artificial intelligence, new technologies have emerged that are enriching this field. It is a dynamic and rapidly evolving area. Even though we cannot precisely determine the very definition of intelligence. Nowadays, it is a broad field that applies knowledge from many areas such as psychology, neuroscience, logic, economics, philosophy, mathematics, management theory, etc. Artificial Intelligence is currently dealt with by a large number of scientists as well as philosophers who raise many questions. One of the most important one is the question whether machines can think and the question whether AI can have its own ethics. The course analyses the moral dilemmas associated with the dynamic development in the AI area and possible scenarios of future developments in this area.
Compulsory literature:
Wendell Wallach. Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, Oxford University Press; 1 edition (June 3, 2010), ISBN-10: 0199737975
Paula Boddington: Towards a Code of Ethics for Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence: Foundations, Theory, and Algorithms), Springer; 1st ed. 2017, ISBN-13: 978-331960647
Mel Thompson, Ethical Theory, Hodder Education an Hachette UK company 2008, ISBN: 978- 0340- 95779- 0
Recommended literature:
Way of continuous check of knowledge in the course of semester
written test, essay
E-learning
Other requirements
writing essays on a given topic
Prerequisities
Subject has no prerequisities.
Co-requisities
Subject has no co-requisities.
Subject syllabus:
1. The emergence of ethics as a science discipline, basic ethical issues and concepts.
2. Basic methodological approaches in ethics (descriptive ethics, normative ethics, meta-ethics, applied ethics).
3. Basic functions of morality, moral reasoning, historical overview of ethical theory.
4. Deontological ethics, utilitarianism and ethics of virtues.
5. Thought experiments in ethics.
6. Artificial Intelligence, its Characteristics and History
7. Development of paradigms of artificial intelligence
8. New Approaches to Artificial Intelligence
9. Current trends in AI research (superintelligence, singularity, transhumanism, etc.)
10. The Second Age of Machines, Artificial Intelligence and Ethical Dilemmas
11. Moral implications of superintelligence and artificial mind
12. Future of AI and possible scenarios
Conditions for subject completion
Occurrence in study plans
Occurrence in special blocks
Assessment of instruction