Ethics for Engineers: Artificial Intelligence
This MIT OpenCourseWare offering examines the ethical questions raised by algorithmic judgment and machine learning systems as they move into high-stakes decisions once made by humans. Drawing on the long-running Ethics for Engineers curriculum, it looks at cases where AI shapes outcomes in hiring, criminal justice, autonomous vehicles, and other domains, asking who is accountable when a system errs and how engineers should weigh competing values like fairness, safety, and transparency during design. Materials include readings, case studies, and discussion-based assignments used in MIT's own classroom, freely published under a Creative Commons license. The course does not teach AI techniques themselves but trains engineering students to recognize and reason through the moral tradeoffs embedded in the systems they build, using real deployed technologies as the test cases throughout.