To the editor: Because the creator and teacher of the AI ethics class at USC talked about on this article, I welcomed Jaweed Kaleem’s reporting on the rise of digital ethics and humanities programs embedded in AI majors and minors and different applications (“USC and UCLA bet big on AI to meet soaring student, job market demands,” Aug. 27).
Since I started instructing courses within the ethics of expertise in 2017, matters that had been on the time attention-grabbing if primarily educational have change into more and more life like. These matters embody totally autonomous deadly weapons, private relationships with chatbots and ubiquitous surveillance. Within the AI period — if that’s what we’re in — universities should expose college students to values aside from effectivity and technical efficiency.
College students urgently want programs that invite them to research whether or not the advantages and harms of those highly effective applied sciences are pretty distributed throughout society and to think about futures the place expertise broadly promotes flourishing human lives. I’ve discovered that my college students recognize the significance of those matters as they put together to start their skilled lives.
Elisa Warford, Woodland Hills
This author is a professor of technical communication apply within the Engineering in Society Program at USC’s Viterbi Faculty of Engineering.
