Inclusion of Ethics Instruction in Technical Machine Learning Courses

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been developed and implemented across all domains of society, and this has accompanied various ethical concerns, including but not limited to predictive policing, autonomous military technologies, issues in medical systems and the prevalence of facial recognition technologies in government surveillance. Given the growth of AI and the proliferation of unethical AI systems, educational institutions are considering where and how to best teach the ethics of AI within the engineering curriculum. Noting the fledgling nature of AI ethics as a discipline, there is no consensus between academics on how to best integrate ethics curriculum within the curricula. This paper describes the development of a survey to better understand the instructor view and experience with integrating ethics curriculum. A questionnaire about ethics integration was designed and shared with all instructors teaching AI or related courses at a large, major research institution. The courses were primarily situated in engineering and computer science. Although the response rate was low, the design of the survey offers a useful example for other researchers considering survey design. This paper presents a work in progress.