Easy and interesting
Spring 2024Overall Rating (4.3 / 5): ★★★★☆
Professor Rating (4.3 / 5): ★★★★☆
Lecture Rating (4.3 / 5): ★★★★☆
Difficulty (0.7 / 5):
Workload: 2 hours/week
Pros: 1. Interesting content on ethics. 2. Easy weekly assignments. 3. Straightforward midterm and final 4. Easy grading. Cons: 1. Lots of readings. 2. The 2nd half on *AI* ethics specifically was very narrow and uninteresting. 3. Detailed Review: It's been 2 years since I took this class, so I'll forget details, but I remember that there were weekly (or every 2 weeks?) readings and lectures, a short weekly quiz (you only get one attempt though), and then you had to write a couple discussion comments about ethics. Then there was a midterm where you'd ask AI some ethics questions and reflect on that. Overall it was quite easy. I realized you mostly didn't need to do the readings if you watched the lectures. That being said, the content is pretty interesting. The first half of the class goes over ethics, covering things like western ethics (kant, utilitarianism), eastern ethics (hinduism, buddhism), and other ethics. The second half applied it more to AI. Maybe 2 hours a week of work. I found the second half less well done and didn't cover much of the interesting current-day AI ethics discussions, including those related to existential risk, AI consciousness and welfare, or evaluating the effect of AI on human meaning and relationships. It was mostly limited to stuff similar to Timnit Gebru and the DAIR Institute. If anything, the professor briefly mentioned and dismissed most of the topics I described as worth discussing in an AI Ethics class.