Ethics, ownership and artificial intelligence

Learning objectives

Explain why computing professionals need a code of conduct, and apply its principles to a scenario involving privacy, honest reporting of a fault or a clash between an employer's interests and the public interest

Distinguish copyright, patents and licensing, and compare free software, freeware, shareware and open source on the rights each grants a user over the source code

Evaluate the ethical issues raised by software piracy, by the collection and sale of personal data without consent, and by the monitoring of employees, presenting more than one point of view

(A Level) Describe artificial intelligence as software that draws decisions from data, distinguish narrow from general artificial intelligence, and explain how machine learning improves performance as more data is seen

(A Level) Describe an artificial neural network in terms of input, hidden and output layers joined by weighted connections, and explain how deep learning makes use of many hidden layers

(A Level) Apply a graph search to find a shortest route, comparing the uniform expansion used by Dijkstra's algorithm with the heuristic estimate used by the A* algorithm

Explain why a computing professional gains from membership of a professional body with a code of ethics, such as the BCS or the IEEE, and compare the licences of the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative with shareware and commercial software

Weigh up the effects of artificial intelligence on society, on the economy and on the environment

(A Level) Distinguish supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, and explain when machine learning, deep learning and reinforcement learning are each the right choice

(A Level) Explain how back propagation corrects the weights of an artificial neural network during training, and how regression lets a machine learning model predict a value