C40 Ethics of Computing

• Offered under: 6.C40, 24.C40
• Term(s): Fall
• Level: Undergraduate 
• Units: 12
• Prerequisite: None
• Instructors: Brian Hedden (Philosophy/EECS), Manish Raghavan (Sloan/EECS)

AI is radically transforming society, with big changes in the economy, education, health care, government, and criminal justice. How can we ensure that these changes are ethical and beneficial? This Common Ground course explores issues like AI Alignment, fairness and bias in algorithmic decision-making, monoculture and homogeneity in AI systems, privacy and data protection, digital surveillance, and LLM ‘model specs’ and ‘constitutions’, among others. It will combine tools and methods from computer science and philosophy to rigorously analyze difficult ethical challenges involved in the development and deployment of AI and computing.