Hi all,

There are interesting talks this week on AI & Ethics at the Centre for
Ethics, University of Toronto, as part of their fantastic on-going
lectures on AI & Ethics in Context.  The 2nd talk is co-sponsored by DCS
and is a precursor to a DCS Distinguished Lecture on this topic by Prof.
Barbara Grosz in early December.

- Sheila

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**Note Location  of all events:
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Room 200, Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place  (just east of Harbord & St. George)

Details follow.
** Please register if you can. ***  The room can fill to capacity.


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Tuesday, October 8, 2019
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Room 200, Larkin Bldg, 15 Devonshire Place

John Basl (*) & Jeff Behrends (**)
(*) Northeastern University, Philosophy
(**) Harvard University, Philosophy

TALK: Why Everyone Has It Wrong About the Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles

Many of those thinking about the ethics of autonomous vehicles believe
there are important lessons to be learned by attending to so-called
Trolley Cases, while a growing opposition is dismissive of their supposed
significance. The optimists about the value of these cases think that
because AVs might find themselves in circumstances that are similar to
Trolley Cases, we can draw on them to ensure ethical driving behavior. The
pessimists are convinced that these cases have nothing to teach us, either
because they believe that the AV and trolley cases are in fact very
dissimilar, or because they are distrustful of the use of thought
experiments in ethics generally. Something has been lost in the moral
discourse between the optimists and the pessimists. We too think that we
should be pessimistic about the ways optimists have leveraged Trolley
Cases to draw conclusions about how to program autonomous vehicles, but
the typical defenses of pessimism fail to recognize how the tools of moral
philosophy can and should be fruitfully applied to AV design. In this talk
we first explain what's wrong with typical arguments for dismissing the
value of trolley cases and then argue that moral philosophers have erred
by overlooking the significance of machine learning techniques in AV
applications, highlighting how best to proceed.

Register:  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/74018885479


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Wed, Oct 9, 2019
12:30 - 2:00 PM
Room 200, Larkin Bldg, 15 Devonshire Place

Jeff Behrends
Harvard University, Philosophy

TALK: Ethics Education in Computer Science: The Embedded EthiCS Approach

While scholarship on integrating ethical content into Computer Science
curricula dates at least to the 1980s, recent moral crises in the tech
industry have given rise to a period of intense interest in ethics
education for computer scientists, both within academia and among the
public at large. There can be little doubt at this point that a
responsible education in computer science should equip students with some
set of ethical knowledge and skills. But identifying precisely what that
set ought to look like, and then designing a feasible curriculum to
achieve it, are difficult tasks for a variety of reasons. At Harvard
University, the Embedded EthiCS program marries the expertise from the
faculty of Computer Science and Philosophy in an attempt to provide
meaningful educational outcomes for students without significant
investments in time for Computer Science faculty members, or a disruptive
restructuring of the Computer Science curriculum. This talk will explain
the basic structure of the program, and address its early successes and
challenges.

Register:
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/jeff-behrends-ethics-education-in-computer-science-ethicsnoon-tickets-74023481225