From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

AI and future opportunities

From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

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AI and future opportunities

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- In our final module we'll be moving from analytics right into artificial intelligence as it relates to ethical and legal issues. Not that we haven't been talking about those things before but especially now we're going to get into the weeds. Eva and Nathan what are students going to learn in this module? - I think that is module is, we'll see some common themes from our earlier modules, but because we're talking about artificial intelligence and the level of technology that is just changing so rapidly, the relationship between law and this technology is even more obscure. So we'll have instances of applying existing law to what we can speculate might be happening in artificial intelligence, but in many cases we're just really, really just waiting to see how things develop. Some things are surprising, right, like so we look at machine learning and machine learning that starts to act like humans. There's instances of robots becoming racist in their language, for example, and wondering first of all, how does that happen, and secondly how do we address it, and who's responsible for it. So we have things that happen in the space like that. We also see that there's a shared responsibility, legal responsibility, that we have to really tease out. New products, doing new things, making decisions, they might be good decisions, they might not work out to be so good in the long run. So we don't know where the legal liability is going to rest. So I think it might be a little bit troubling for students on one hand, because it is so obscure, but I'd say for students in this course, just be patient, be open, be creative when we see how we're applying the law to artificial intelligence. - Great, thank you. - Yeah, when people hear the phrase artificial intelligence a lot of people think about the future and maybe they think about beings walking around that look like humans, but aren't really human, and if you're thinking about that in ethical context you might wonder, gee do we have any moral responsibilities to these beings. I think those are interesting thought experiments to run, actually, talk about them in my university courses, but we're talking about things that are happening right now, issues that are important right now. So artificial intelligence relies on algorithms and one of the really hot topics in ethics right now is what kind of decision making power do these beings have. Which is an ethical issue because if we fundamentally lose track of how machines are making decisions, there's a breakdown in trust as we've been seeing from the labs, there could be bias issues easily, if we don't really understand what variables are being taken into account. There's also something important about autonomy. Autonomy being one of the ethical values. Is that when we don't have the power to control our destiny anymore, we can't make our own decisions, when we outsource all that to a robot, there's something that's lost about our humanness. So that's one of the big topics that we'll discuss in this course. - Excellent, thank you and let's dig in one last time.

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