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Dr Alessandra Basso

This course is available on the MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy, MSc in Philosophy of Economics and the Social Sciences and MSc in Philosophy of Science. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course introduces you to the core philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and ethics concepts needed to build better technology and reason about its impact on the economy, civil society, and government.

Some questions that the course might consider include:

• What is intelligence, and how does it vary between types of agents (human, animal, artificial)? What are the normative assumptions behind research in intelligence?
• What is data, and how can we design more ethical data governance regimes?
• Can technology be racist? If so, what are promising strategies for promoting fairness mitigating algorithmic bias?
• Can we understand black box AI and explain its outputs? Why is it morally important that we do so?
• How can we embed human values into AI systems?

10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the WT.

Students will write a 1,000 word essay outline. Students will also engage in a variety of formative activities in seminars to build skills for summatives.

• Gabriel, “Towards a Theory of Justice for Artificial Intelligence”, Daedalus
• Friedman, Kahn, and Borning, “Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems”
• Serpico “What kind of kind is intelligence?”
• Henry Shevlin, Karina Vold, Matthew Crosby & Marta Halina, “The limits of machine intelligence”
• Halina, “Insightful artificial intelligence”
• Alexandrova and Fabian, “Democratizing Measurement: Or Why Thick Concepts Call for Coproduction”
• Northcott, “Big Data and Prediction: Four Case Studies”
• Simons and Alvarado, “Can we trust Big Data? Applying philosophy of science to software”
• Viljoen, “A Relational Theory of Data Governance”
• Johnson, “Are Algorithms Value Free?”
• Munton, “Beyond accuracy: Epistemic flaws with statistical generalizations.”
• Barocas, Hardt, and Narayanan, Fairness and Machine Learning: Limitations and Opportunities
• [selections]

Project (50%, 1500 words) in the WT.
Essay (50%, 2000 words) in the ST.

For the group project, students will be assessed individually on their presentation (20%) and on an individual write-up of the group activity (30%). For students who are not able to do a class presentation on Disability and Wellbeing grounds, their entire group project mark will be determined by the individual write-up (50%). The essay is a re-write of a shorter formative outline on the basis of feedback from the class or seminar teacher and peers.