The quick emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence in all sectors of the economy as well as daily life poses new challenges for Society. In the past period a group of EURIDICE partners have been involved in co-designing and lecturing courses in Generative AI covering a wide interdisciplinary range of topics, and addressing some pressing questions such as:
Technical practice: how does one practically usefully employ LLM systems (good “prompt engineering” to obtain results you want; plus issues of validation and information quality control).
Technical theoretical understanding: architectural and algorithmic structure of Gen_AI (what can one reasonably expect and not from LLMs and why; “hallucination”, “stochastic parrots”, “ChatGPT as Bullshit”).
Science-technology-society-ethics: Ethical, social, economic, political, societal impacts of Gen_AI (What are they? SDGs, “Digital Humanism”, what are the implications for (global) human values and rights, and what are we going to do about it (policy-making)?).
Foundational scientific and moral issues: the (sloppy) use and meaning of terms/concepts such as “intelligence”, “knowledge”, “thinking”, “autonomy”, responsibility; speculations about futures (“Life 3.0”?).
Environmental: what is the energy footprint of Generative AI and what will it need in terms of mineral resources?
Decolonial theory: what are the impacts of Gen Ai for the Digital Divide?
Geo-political: Who benefits most from the Gen AI bubble and who is in charge of the decision making which is related to it? Does this put even more political power in the hands of a small group of US-based tech companies?
(This is a non-exhaustive list).
In an upcoming content session we would like to summarize and share some of our experiences concerning Gen_AI-related courses and put the joint experiences, insights and questions on the table and have a discussion on important open EURIDICE educational issues emerging from teaching AI/digital technologies and their ethical and societal impacts.
On the EURIDICE agenda new questions pop up, for example…
- How can we sensibly structure the extremely broad field of AI and (digital) society and the current public debate, for the purpose of quality education?
- To this end, do we need to innovate educational contents and forms? If so, how, in what direction?
- This especially so in the light of the very different audiences that EURIDICE addresses (students, teachers, professionals, different societal and industry/business sectors)?
- Assessment: how can we achieve in our exams and assignments that we assess student learning progress proper rather than the quality of AI chatbots?
Et cetera. Undoubtedly many good questions (and hopefully, some good answers) will nearly automatically emerge along the way of such a round-table discussion.
The featured picture of flying tech bros is a hand-painted artwork by Leeuw van Moerkerken, who is actually a human being.