PHIL 694: Special Topics in Contemporary Philosophy
PHIL 694-002: AI: Ethics, Policy, and Society
(Spring 2025)
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM T
Van Metre Hall (formerly Founders Hall) 322
Section Information for Spring 2025
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are rapidly expanding across multiple domains, leading to significant debate about its ethical and societal impacts. Still a matter of debate is what appropriate legal and governance structures should be created to ensure the ethical design, development, deployment, and use of AI. Further complicating the debate is the question of which parties and stakeholders should contribute to creating AI governance structures and mechanisms. The course will explore pressing issues in ethics and policy, including transparency, privacy and surveillance, misinformation and disinformation, fairness, algorithmic bias (from both underlying data and modeling choices), justice, equity, trust, and labor practices and supply chains. These topics will be grounded in specific use cases often drawn from cutting edge topics in the news. The course is divided into three units. Unit one integrates philosophical knowledge with ethical AI principles, ethical AI frameworks, and national strategies for ethical AI. Unit two explores several methods and tools for applying ethical AI theories, principles, and frameworks. Unit three puts the theories, principles, frameworks, methods, and tools from units one and two into further practice.
*This course is open to graduate students and undergraduates with advanced standing.
Bio
Dr. Jesse Kirkpatrick
Jesse Kirkpatrick is a Research Associate Professor and the co-director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center at George Mason University. He is an International Security Fellow at New America and serves as a consultant for numerous organizations, including some of the world’s largest technology companies. Jesse’s research and teaching focuses on responsible innovation, with an emphasis on Responsible AI. He has received various honors and awards and is an official “Mad Scientist” for the U.S. Army.
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Course Information from the University Catalog
Credits: 3
Enrollment limited to students with a class of Advanced to Candidacy, Graduate, Junior Plus, Non-Degree or Senior Plus.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate, Non-Degree or Undergraduate level students.
Students in a Non-Degree Undergraduate degree may not enroll.
This course is graded on the Graduate Regular scale.
The University Catalog is the authoritative source for information on courses. The Schedule of Classes is the authoritative source for information on classes scheduled for this semester. See the Schedule for the most up-to-date information and see Patriot web to register for classes.