This lecture provides an introduction to the emerging field of the Ethics of AI. It is open to all interested students of all levels, including those from the humanities, as well as scientific and technical disciplines. The lecture is an ideal starting point to get an orientation in the field and to possibly start engaging with more specialised courses and/or research projects in the context of the Ethics of AI group at the IKW.
The lecture will provide an overview of problems, philosophical theories and methods that comprise the field of Ethics of AI. This includes both the philosophical foundations of ethics and critical theory as well as different technological phenomena and legal aspects of AI. A particular focus will be contemporary data-driven and machine learning-based AI technology and its applications in digital consumer media. As we will see, questions of social equality and fairness are central to today's ethical concerns about AI, so that ethics needs to adopt a societal perspective, analysing constellations of power, discrimination and subordination that relate to AI technology. We will also touch on relevant legal debates such as privacy and data protection legislation and ask the questions of how to actually do ethics of AI in interdisciplinary collaborations.
This lecture will be offered every winter term. In the summer term there will be a seminar that elaborates in more detail on some of the problems covered in the lecture.
There will be a Klausur at the end of the semester to earn 4 ECTS points.
The lecture will be taught online if the pandemic does not allow to fit everyone in thr same room.
