FYI

Best Regards, Ishtiaque

Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of Toronto, ON, CA Ph: +1 647 220 3482 Skype: syed.ishtiaque.ahmed web: https://www.ishtiaque.net/ My Availability: Google Calendar Link https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ishtiaque.uoft%40gmail.com&ctz=America%2FToronto

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Sheila McIlraith sheila@cs.toronto.edu Date: Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 10:02 AM Subject: AI & Ethics Talks this week. To: dcs-all@cs.toronto.edu

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-scien...