Module 9: Advanced Topics

AI’s Impact on Humanity

AI’s impact on humanity

We all know that AI is changing our world and doing so quite rapidly! What precisely that means for all of us is partly up to US, the creators and users of AI! We have worked to educate ourselves on many aspects of the ethical and responsible use of AI. In this topic, we are going to think creatively about how AI will impact humanity as a whole.

To get the creative juices flowing, I asked chatGPT 4.0 for a graphic representing how AI will impact humanity. This is what it gave me:

Here's a graphic summarizing AI's impact on humanity. It includes symbols and icons to represent key areas such as healthcare, education, employment, ethics, and privacy, among others. The infographic also illustrates the debate over AI's benefits versus its challenges and highlights the global reach of AI.

There is a lot to think about in that graphic (and many things to simply shake our heads at). It also gave me this for an explanation.

Here’s a graphic summarizing AI’s impact on humanity. It includes symbols and icons to represent key areas such as healthcare, education, employment, ethics, and privacy, among others. The infographic also illustrates the debate over AI’s benefits versus its challenges and highlights the global reach of AI.

Assignment 1

Today’s assignment is going to be rather different than your usual readings for this class but have fun with it!

First, as a warm up, watch this super short trailer for the movie AI

Then we will jump into reading some short stories. Your next assignment is to write one of your own but first, we will read and discuss these!

Read Telling Stories on Culturally Responsive AI. This is a really fun book full of short stories from a recent workshop held to discuss the impact of AI on humanity and our future. They wanted to focus on culturally relevant stories and they are great.
Read the short stories shared by the last time this class was taught (Spring 2021) . Note, students were not required to share but many of them did. We will do the same for our assignment 2.

Assignment 2

For today’s assignment, I want you to write a short story (aim to be under 300 words, though I will not do a word count) in the same idea as the reading for Assignment 1. Please turn your short story in on canvas. I will share all of the stories with the full class but, if you do not want your story shared publicly (e.g. posted on a page like last time’s class) or if you don’t mind sharing but don’t want your name on it, please note that in your submission on canvas.

Note: This assignment is due the day before class so people have time to read your short stories before class!

Assignment 3

Read your fellow students’ short stories (they will all be posted to a link on slack to preserve privacy in case people don’t want them posted here).
As you read the short stories, see if you can figure out which one was written by an AI. We will discuss your thoughts in class!

Assignment 4

Google just released a brand new paper on the ethics of advanced AI assistants. Please do the following:
- Read the blog post summarizing and announcing their paper: The ethics of advanced AI assistants
- I want you to either skim the paper (it is LONG) or watch the video of the main author talking about the paper. The main author posted this video encouraging people to watch him on 1.25x so feel no guilt if you choose this!