What can AI do, and what should it do? My approach to AI and Ethics builds a single inquiry from two disciplines that rarely share a room: computer science, where students implement a neural network from first principles without libraries, and serious philosophy, where they reason about how one ought to act. The pairing exposes a tension at the heart of the liberal arts in the age of AI. If a machine ties your shoes, do you ever learn to tie them yourself—or to do your arithmetic, your writing, your deciding? The liberal arts exist to cultivate precisely the capacities AI now offers to outsource: judgment, reflection, moral agency, the power to be more than a child of one’s time. This talk asks whether teaching AI must mean defending those capacities, and how one course might do both at once.
