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Knowledge/A Level/H446/01 Computer systems/Moral and Ethical Issues/Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

1.5.2 Moral and Ethical Issues

Moral and Ethical Issues — Note 3 of 9

Candidates need to understand how the development of artificial intelligence has moral, social, ethical and cultural impacts on a variety of people.

What you need to know

Artificial intelligence allows computers to carry out tasks that normally need human intelligence, such as recognising speech and images, making predictions and generating text. Its rapid development has wide-ranging impacts on individuals and society.

What to know

  • Opportunities: medical diagnosis, personalised learning, scientific research, virtual assistants, accessibility tools, fraud detection.
  • Risks: bias in training data leading to unfair outcomes; job displacement; misinformation and deepfakes; privacy concerns over the data used for training.
  • Questions of responsibility: who is accountable for decisions made by an AI system?
  • Lack of transparency: it can be hard to explain how a complex AI system reached its output.
  • Ethical questions about using AI in surveillance, weapons and decisions about people's lives.

Key terms

Artificial intelligence

The ability of a computer system to carry out tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning and recognising patterns.

Exam technique

  • Tip:Give balanced arguments with specific, current examples.

Moral and Ethical Issues

Note 3 of 9

  1. 1Computers in the workforce
  2. 2Automated decision making
  3. 3Artificial intelligence
  4. 4Environmental effects
  5. 5Censorship and the Internet
  6. 6Monitor behaviour
  7. 7Analyse personal information
  8. 8Piracy and offensive communications
  9. 9Layout, colour paradigms and character sets
Topic overview
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