Embedded ethics to teach machine learning courses: an experience

Abstract

Artificial intelligence offers many possibilities, some can improve the well-being of people, but others can be harmful to citizens, especially women. Examples are hiring decision support systems, criminal justice, facial and voice recognition, or machine translators. In order to make students aware of the development of these intelligent systems in the future, it is necessary to incorporate specific ethics content with a gender perspective as a transversal competence in university degrees and masters related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. In this paper we present the experiences in two subjects of machine learning, one undergraduate and one master, which are taught for the first time in the academic year 2020-2021 at the University of Santiago de Compostela. The activity allowed students to reflect on ethical and gender issues in the exercise of their professional future for the development of machine learning systems.