Democratising AI knowledge to inform ethical choices | University World News

A groundbreaking partnership is trying to support democracy by enabling a broad section of society to not only update their skills but contribute to the debate on how artificial intelligence (AI) should be used. It began with the aim of educating 1% of Finns but now has higher ambition, says Jan Petter Myklebust.
 

Teemu Roos, brains behind the hit MOOC 'Elements of AI'.
Photo: Twitter

When Finland’s University of Helsinki and the consulting agency Reaktor launched a massive open online course or MOOC on ‘Elements of AI’ in May 2018, it became an instant success with more than 20,000 requests to join it within a day of its launch. By the middle of March this year the course had 150,000 students in 110 countries, making it Finland’s most popular online course.
 
The original long-term aim was to educate 1% of Finns – about 54,000 people – in order to ‘support democracy’ by enabling a broad section of the population to contribute to the debate on how artificial intelligence should be used. Given the amount of international interest, there is now talk of trying to reach 1% of the global population.
 
Computer scientist Teemu Roos, who is the brains behind the initiative, explains that rather than trying to train a new generation of cutting-edge developers, the aim is to raise awareness about the opportunities and risks of AI among people who are strangers to science, so that they can decide for themselves what uses of AI would be beneficial and where they want their government to invest...

The course was designed jointly by Reaktor and the University of Helsinki, and Roos, who is an associate professor at the University of Helsinki, is the lead instructor.
 
It is a part of the AI education programme of the Finnish Centre for Artificial Intelligence and is offered in cooperation with the Open University and MOOC.fi.  
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Source: University World News