This project will examine frameworks, approaches to, and influences on ethics education in the context of AI, and assemble criteria to assess their outcomes.

As researchers who also teach, we are fully embedded in this exercise ourselves. Not only do we have a ring-side seat to the challenges of AI ethics education, and particularly in developing a Master’s level program that is influenced by the Humanities, but we are also deeply invested in the answers to the question of what kinds of pedagogies are effective. For this reason, we consider this work to be somewhat auto-ethnographic, and situate ourselves as subject-participants in our own work. And while this work is not a work situated in Anthropology, it is influenced by the value of self-reflexive engagement, a key aspect of ethnographic work.

This project is supported by funding from the IEEE and integrates understanding of the IEEE's Ethically-aligned Design curriculum and related specifications for the design of AI and autonomous systems. 

The AI and Ethics Pedagogy Project is a mid-stream intervention that asks how the policy makers, managers, designers, journalists, engineers, and others who are already working in contexts where AI technologies are being developed, applied, and regulated, might be best served by different pedagogical approaches to ethics.  What kinds of holistic AI ethics education for practitioners goes beyond shallow ‘ethics washing’ by industry, or narrow ‘value alignment’ approaches? And more importantly, how do we know that these approaches work? What does this mean? So, this project is organised around developing pedagogical guidelines for facilitating and supporting AI ethics education, empirically grounded, ‘field tested’ exemplary learning materials towards this, and arriving at indicators or criteria for assessing this kind of education. This in turn will help us develop more refined learning goals for future teaching and learning about AI and ethics.