My MOOC journey: chapter 2 - Utilitarianism Week

Key ideas

My main takeaways from this week's “Ethics of AI” course revolve around utilitarianism. It's not that I wasn't familiar with the term before, but I was really intrigued by the fact that it has so many subcategories and ways of use in the reasoning process. Perspectives on utilitarianism and the concept of the "good" in general are truly diverse; while the distinction between beneficence and non-maleficence is understandable enough, concepts like act utilitarianism, rule utilitarianism, total utilitarianism, and average utilitarianism were entirely new to me. The same goes for the differences between subjective, eudaimonic, and social well-being.

The "greater good" is a tricky concept, as is artificial intelligence itself, so combining these topics creates a highly complex subject—something that became apparent as early as the second chapter of the course. I am actually quite curious to see what comes next.

My learning process

It took me longer than expected to work through this chapter because I had a hectic week; I only remembered the course during the few spare minutes of waiting between tasks or sometimes in the evening before bed. Consequently, I often had to go back and refresh my memory on what had been covered. Fortunately, the lessons are usually structured so that the assignments relate only to the specific lesson rather than the entire chapter, but I still wanted to get back into the mind-flow.

I really appreciate the option to study via mobile phone—it’s a great way to make use of time spent on the tram and so on. However, completing assignments was a bit tricky; if I needed to look up a translation, the page would sometimes reset, making it impossible to fill in multiple text fields at once—which slowed me down a bit on the final assignment.