Homework: Reflect on Readings

Background

As part of this course, you will be given assigned readings. These readings will focus on design, AI, and ethics. Please take the time to reflect on each week’s readings to fully understand the material and be fully prepared for the following week’s course.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this activity, you will better grasp the readings assigned for this week. You will have summarized the main concepts and ideas in the papers using your own words. This will enable you to work with the materials more effectively as the course progresses.

Instructions

• In your notebook, you can create an entry for each question below, with an answer in your own words.
• Questions for Alfrink et al. (2021)
  • Describe at least three properties an AI system must have to qualify as contestable.
  • Contestability is a way to safeguard certain specific fundamental human rights. What are those rights, and how would you describe them?
  • The design framework organizes possible interventions into two categories. What are those categories? Why do the authors use this organization?
• Questions for Gilbert et al. (2023)
  • Why is reinforcement learning a helpful way to think about AI systems, even when they technically don’t use this machine learning approach?
  • What are the three levels of feedback the authors identify?
  • What are the top-level components of a Reward Report?
  • How do reward reports enable societal discussion about design decisions?

Product

The assigned readings should be summarized in your own words and captured in your notebook as a collection of notes, each containing the summary of one idea.

Follow-up

Generated ideas will be used in next week’s session.