Università Roma Tre

the origins and the open questions of Artificial intelligence
The course is dedicated to the birth of Artificial intelligence which happened more or less together witht the birth of the first electronic computers. The term was invented in 1956, but the discussion around the possibilities and consequences of what was called mechanical or machine intelligence started during the early Fifties and even earlier.
The Famous Turing Test created a huge interest since it was invented and proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing. Many years and many different methods were considered since AI origins, now many perspectives and technologies changed since then, in order to solve problems that required intelligence and problem solving capabilities to be solved.
At present there are many soft bots, many robot and many artificial devices that with the help of algorithms seem to espress intelligence and oblige us to change the concept of intelligence itself, both if applied to humans or to machines.
the most interesting phenomenon is the tendence to attribute to machine intelligent capabilities, mainly when we don't know precisely how the machine works.
This social dimention in attributing intelligence to machines was underlined by Turing too at the very beginning of machine intelligence reflection.
However this characteristic risks to produce unintendend and undesired consequences for human beings. we know that not many ara capable of understanding how to program a deep learning algorithm, and that more and more even programmers ignore how the machine produced the output results, because the layers of calculations are too difficult to follow in details also by those who programmed them. We know that only a small group of programmers and experts know the details. they tend to be trained by the same universities and to be hired by the same few multinational companies.
There are political and social problems that need a solution when we introduce a new AI tool. Innovation is not enough we need to build tools that are fair and useful to promote the development and wellbeing of all humans and not only of a small minority.
the course proposes some methods and histories to understand the political and social dimensions of the technological choices around us, with special regard to AI.

Somenzi V. Cordeschi R. (1994) La filosofia degli automi, Bollati boringhieri, Torino, pp. 19-203
O'Neil C. (2017) Weapons of math destruction, Penguin, London, New York
Tegmark M. (2017) Life 3.0 being human in the age of artificial intelligence, Alfred Knopf Inc.