De Kai
AI Professor @ HKUST CSE / Berkeley ICSI / The Future Society
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The Raising AI course companion for a common core university course on AI Ethics.
Grading scheme
- 24% exercises, quizzes, assignments
- 27% midterms
- 25% class participation
- 29% final project, presentation
Syllabus
Chapter 2: Our artificial children
Trolley problems everywhere!
Overview and orientation to topics of fairness, accountability, and transparency in society, AI and machine learning, the impact of AI and automation upon labor and the job market (IEEE foundation of methodologies to guide ethical research and design) CILO-1, 5, 8
LECTURE 1
Provocation:
"The Trolley Problem", The Good Place, s02e05
Required reading:
- RAI ch2
- EAD p9-35, "From Principles to Practice", "General Principles"
Suggested materials:
The Good Place might be just a sitcom, but excellent introductory ethics books have been based on it.
Exercises:
- How should the AIs in self-driving cars make life-and-death decisions when suddenly faced with unexpected real world emergencies?
- Can AIs be trusted to make those decisions?
- Statistics show that self-driving AIs are far less likely to injure or kill people than human drivers. Is it more ethical to allow or to prohibit self-driving cars? (Notice that this dilemma is itself yet another trolley problem!)
- If a self-driving car is at fault in an accident, who is accountable? The owner of the car? The responsible human in the car? The manufacturer of the car? The maker of the AI in the car? Society at large? Nobody?
LECTURE 2
Provocation:
Required reading:
- Edmond Awad et al. (2018). “The Moral Machine experiment,” Nature 563(7729): 59–64.
Suggested materials:
The creator of the Moral Machine, Iyad Rahwan, is interviewed on my podcast.
- De Kai, host (2025). “What have machines learned about human ethics? MIT Moral Machine creator Iyad Rahwan and De Kai”. De Kai on AI, podcast, s01.
Exercises:
- Can you give logical rules to describe how a self-driving AI should make decisions?
- What criteria and objectives should a self-driving AI align to in its decision making?
- Are those culturally dependent?
- What is fairness?
- What happens to human taxi drivers and truck drivers?
Final project
Due: 30 Nov 2026 at 11:59pm
Required texts
[RAI] Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future by De Kai, from MIT Press and Penguin Random House. Hardcover: MIT Press, 13 May 2025, 978-0262049764. eBook: MIT Press, 3 Jun 2025, 978-0262383653. Paperback: MIT Press, 2 Jun 2026, 978-0262054324. Audiobook: Penguin Random House, 8 Sep 2026, 979-8217535613.
[EAD] Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (1st edition), The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, by IEEE. 2019.
Reference material
Exercises:
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