Why You Should Learn Ethics of AI With This Free Online Course

Besides being known as the happiest country in the world, Finland is a technology leader, ahead of China and the US.

Finland is making good on its tech legacy, as the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Centre for Artificial Intelligence FCAI, and the City of Helsinki are collaborating to launch a free webinar on the Ethics of AI, followed by a full Ethics of AI course.

Why Ethical AI Matters

The ethics of AI is a wildly broad and complex topic, since AI’s implications are broad and complex. No industry has gone untouched by AI.

The CEO of Udacity, Gabe Dalporto, in an August 2020 Times article, says this:

“A billion people will lose their jobs over the next 10 years due to AI, and if anything, COVID has accelerated that by about nine years.”

In other words, he predicts that AI could cause a billion people to lose their jobs within a year of that article — nine months from now, as of writing.

Even if just a small fraction of that comes to fruition, it would have massive ramifications. Ethical AI involves considering how we can distribute wealth created by machines, provide basic needs to all, and ultimately thrive in a post-work society.

AI, by its very nature, becomes exponentially better over time, tracking the exponential growth in both data and computing power.

State-of-the-art models like GPT-3 can create text that’s indistinguishable from human writing. Other models can be used to create DeepFakes, and even audio DeepFakes, or AI-generated video and audio of humans that accurately mimic people.

Ethical AI tackles the ethical challenges around these kinds of use-cases.

Course Overview

To gain a better understanding of the course, the Helsinki Centre for Data Science is offering a free webinar on 27 November at 13:00–15:00 (Helsinki EET). 

You’ll hear keynotes from the Mayor of Helsinki, as well as the chair of the EU commission High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence.

More than learning about theory, you’ll learn practical ideas on implementing the ethics of AI in the City of Helsinki, by the mayor himself. The new Ethics of AI course will also be introduced in this webinar, so be sure to attend if you want to be in-the-know.

Course Follow-Up

Learning continuously in this age of constant change is a must. That being said, you want to apply what you learn, or you’ll quickly forget the concepts.

A great way to do that is to consider the ethics of the AI projects you’re working on. While you may not be working on things like self-driving cars or DeepFake-esque technology, ethics is a universally applicable topic.

For example, AutoML tools like Obviously.AI can be used to predict employee attrition, given attributes like their tenure, satisfaction, salary, overtime hours, and so on. In this case, it wouldn’t be ethical to use personal attributes like gender or race, which could create a sexually and racially biased model.

In short, this is an amazing, free opportunity to learn ethical AI with a community of other learners.