Speaker: Theresa Willem, Helmholtz AI / Technical University of Munich
Date: 23.01.2025, 11:00 am
Title: The Ethics of AI: Foundations of Applied Ethics and Emerging Risks from AI Development
Abstract: The rapid advancement of AI has profoundly reshaped science, industries, societies, and personal lives. In doing so, AI demonstrated various benefits but also introduced novel ethical challenges.
This lecture is an introduction to AI ethics – the field occupied with investigating and deriving normative claims about these weights of these risks and benefits. We will start by examining what ‘socio-technical systems’ are; this concept will help us understand how human, social and technological interaction in AI tools works and will accompany us throughout the lecture. From there, we unpack what “ethics” is to begin with. We will hear about the roots of contemporary applied ethics, such as AI ethics, and will shed light onto cryptic key terms such as “non-maleficence”, “beneficence”, “autonomy”, and “justice”. Foremost along medical use cases, we will then illuminate ethical challenges that are specific to AI, such as certain biases, opacity of AI models, and novel issues in allocating responsibility for effects of AI usage.
We will round up the session by touching upon mitigation strategies of AI ethical challenges, such as Embedded Ethics, a proactive approach to mitigating ethical dilemmas during research, design, development, and implementation of AI systems.
Theresa Willem
Theresa Willem is an AI Ethics Consultant at Helmholtz AI and manages the Munich Embedded Ethics and Social Science Hub (MESH) at TUM. Currently finishing up her PhD in medical AI ethics at TUM’s School of Social Sciences and Technology, her research spans ethical and social aspects of AI and digital health. Theresa contributed to projects like TherVacB, exploring the ethics of patient recruitment via AI-powered social media platforms, and DR-AI, focusing on the ethics of AI applications for radiology and dermatology. Earlier, she studied media sciences in Regensburg, Berlin, and Brussels and worked in the Berlin health tech startup ecosystem. Theresa Willem is an alumna of the Bavarian Elite Academy and the German National Academic Foundation.
