Ethics of AI
Online certificate course
Learn new frameworks and explore the ethical impacts of AI on individuals, your organisation, and society to make defensible, ethically informed decisions about how you use AI across different contexts.
3 weeks
6–8 hours of self-paced learning per week, entirely online.
Email: lseonline@getsmarter.com
Call: +44 1223 790 603
ABOUT THIS COURSE
As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption becomes standard, professionals across sectors are increasingly required to make and justify decisions with significant ethical stakes. This online course helps you untangle the complexities surrounding technology and ethics, empowering you to make defensible, responsible decisions about AI use across all its contexts.
This online ethical AI course encourages you to dig into the philosophical underpinnings of AI. Equipped with an academically rigorous ethics toolkit – a working set of concepts, distinctions, and methods – you will work through example cases: judging accountability when an AI-assisted decision goes wrong, spotting manipulation in a companion chatbot, and weighing structural responses to AI's impact on work. You will examine the ethical impacts of AI for individuals, organisations, and society while developing a deeper understanding of AI’s limitations and your own ethical responsibilities.
By taking a sociotechnical view – looking beyond the algorithm to the data behind it, the company who developed it, and the people who use it – you will use methods to map out solutions and sharpen your judgement. You will learn to diagnose ethical problems that others miss and articulate them with clarity. Crucially, you will produce work you can keep, including a capstone project that applies these methods to frontier AI.
Throughout the course, you will benefit from LSE’s research in the philosophy and politics of AI and join weekly live sessions in a peer group setting. Here, you will pressure test your ideas and gain new perspectives alongside tutors and a global cohort, leaving with a more reasoned and defensible approach to AI use.
HOW IS THIS COURSE DIFFERENT?
This three-week online course is tailored for professionals who use, manage, evaluate, or advise on AI. The course treats AI ethics as a dynamic field of critical inquiry, exploring the sociotechnical realities of AI as models embedded within organisations and society. Engaging with various theories and philosophies, you will leave the course with a working set of concepts and methods to apply to any AI system, along with an ethically informed approach that can evolve alongside the technology.
A POWERFUL COLLABORATION
The London School of Economics and Political Science is collaborating with online education provider GetSmarter to create a new class of learning experience – one that is high-touch, intimate, and personalised for the working professional.
ABOUT LSE
The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is a leading dedicated social science university. LSE was founded in 1895 with the aim of understanding the causes of things for the “betterment of society”. LSE seeks to make research and teaching practical and relevant to the real world. The School counts 20 Nobel Prize winners and 40 world leaders amongst its alumni and staff. LSE has students from over 160 countries, and over 100 languages are spoken on campus.
ABOUT LSE ONLINE CERTIFICATES
LSE is dedicated to addressing global issues through research and education, and is the most international of all British universities. By offering online certificate courses designed by expert LSE faculty members, the School aims to make its state-of-the-art social sciences research and insights available to a wider global audience. The supported, interactive online learning model allows participants to study from anywhere in the world, at times of their convenience, while still interacting with peers and teaching staff alike.
ABOUT GETSMARTER
GetSmarter partners with the world’s leading universities and institutions to select, design and deliver premium online short courses with a data-driven focus on learning gain.
Technology meets academic rigour in GetSmarter’s people-mediated model, which enables lifelong learners across the globe to obtain industry-relevant skills that are certified by the world’s most reputable academic institutions.
As a participant, you will also gain unlimited access to edX’s Career Engagement Network at no extra cost. This platform will provide you with valuable career resources and events to support your professional journey. You can look forward to benefits including rich content, career templates, webinars, workshops, career fairs, networking events, panel discussions, and exclusive recruitment opportunities to connect you with potential employers.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
Please note that module titles and their contents are subject to change during course development.
Understand how AI systems function from a philosophical perspective to diagnose where ethical choices arise in the use, development, and deployment of AI systems, using an ethical toolkit.
- Explain what distinguishes AI ethics from regulatory compliance
- Discuss the basic building blocks of AI through a philosophical lens
- Explain foundational concepts in AI ethics and epistemology
- Apply an ethical and socio-technical lens to different stages of AI development and deployment
Understand individual responsibility when using AI in your personal and professional lives, and learn how AI can enhance and undermine human agency.
- Explain the ethical implications of AI use
- Discuss individual responsibility when using AI in your personal and professional lives
- Determine persona-based ethical responsibilities
- Examine the impact of AI systems on human agency and the impact this can have on our ability to meet our ethical responsibilities
Learn how to identify and articulate ethical tradeoffs arising from the development and deployment of AI at scale, and explore how AI can undermine core societal values and how those risks fall unequally across society.
- Articulate ethical trade-offs arising from the development and deployment of AI at scale
- Analyse AI's political economy by identifying where value concentrates and is extracted
- Assess the legitimacy of algorithmic governance and AI's effect on the information ecosystem
- Analyse how businesses developing and using AI systems can exploit market failures, and the difficulties of addressing these failures at the global level
- Evaluate how AI affects work, weighing structural responses against individual ones
WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE
This course is for people who use, manage, evaluate, or advise on AI. Grounded in LSE's philosophy department, this AI ethics course gives you a working set of concepts and methods you can bring to any AI system you encounter. The aim isn't to leave with a checklist, but with a defensible, ethically informed approach to AI that evolves alongside the technology.
Professionals in the following roles will especially benefit:
- Executives, founders, and board members who treat AI as a leadership responsibility rather than just a technology problem, and want to set standards and accountability for their teams
- Tech leads, product managers, and data scientists involved in AI deployment who want to untangle the ethical complexities inherent in AI systems and understand their impact
- Consultants and advisors who want to build frameworks to guide client organisations and leadership teams through high-stakes AI decisions
- Compliance, governance, and risk professionals who must navigate high-stakes AI decisions and want to articulate ethical justifications beyond regulatory requirements
- Professionals who use AI in their day-to-day work across finance, marketing, sales, HR, and operations, who want to understand their responsibilities when leveraging these tools
- Civic, policy, and social-impact professionals in the public sector, NGOs, journalism, and development, who want to explore the systemic ethical impacts of AI on fairness, democracy, and power
This AI ethics course is also suitable for anyone who is looking for a rigorous, philosophy-led introduction to the ethics of AI.
THIS COURSE IS FOR YOU IF YOU WANT TO:
COMPLETE A CAPSTONE PROJECT
Demonstrate your knowledge on AI topics, including AI’s accountability, chatbot manipulation, and AI’s work.
DIAGNOSE ETHICAL PROBLEMS
Be able to confidently articulate complex ethical trade-offs in development and deployment of AI, including power, risk, and benefit.
USE AI RESPONSIBLY
Deepen your understanding of AI’s limitations, impacts, and your own ethical responsibilities.
GAIN CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS
Debate the key ethical issues of AI while engaging online with peers and tutors.
YOUR SKILLS RECOGNISED
Validate your skills online with an official digital certificate of completion as well as a digital badge from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Your digital badge will be issued to you through Accredible upon completion of the course. You’ll be able to share your certificate and your badge on LinkedIn and other networking sites.
WHO YOU’LL LEARN FROM
This subject matter expert from LSE guides the course design and appears in a number of course videos, along with a variety of industry professionals.
YOUR COURSE CONVENOR
Dr Kate Vredenburgh
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE
As an expert in social science, political philosophy, and the philosophy of technology, Kate has a particular interest in topics that intersect with ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. After completing her PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, Kate became a postdoctoral fellow at both the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Much of her research and teaching interacts with other disciplines, such as economics and computer science.
GUEST EXPERT
Dr Cat Wade
Course Contributor
HOW YOU’LL LEARN
This online course is broken up into manageable units designed to accelerate your learning process through diverse activities:
- Work through your downloadable and online instructional material
- Interact with your peers and learning facilitators through live online sessions and discussion forums
- Enjoy a wide range of interactive content including videos, podcasts, quizzes, case studies, and more
- Complete a capstone project, analysing the ethical implications of a chosen AI hypothetical scenario
Apply what you learn throughout this online learning experience and broaden your understanding of AI ethics with targeted, expert-led insights.
YOUR SUCCESS TEAM
GetSmarter, with whom LSE is collaborating to deliver this online course, provides a personalised approach to online education that ensures you’re supported throughout your learning journey.
HEAD TUTOR
A subject expert who’ll guide you through content-related challenges.
SUCCESS ADVISOR
Your one-on-one support is available during University hours (8am–5pm GMT) to resolve technical and administrative challenges.
GLOBAL SUCCESS TEAM
Available 24/7 to solve your tech-related and administrative queries and concerns.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
BASIC REQUIREMENTS
In order to complete this course, you’ll need a current email account and access to a computer and the internet, as well as a PDF Reader. You may need to view Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, and read and create documents in Microsoft Word or Excel.
BROWSER REQUIREMENTS
We recommend that you use Google Chrome as your internet browser when accessing the Online Campus. Although this is not a requirement, we have found that this browser performs best for ease of access to course material. This browser can be downloaded here.
ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Certain courses may require additional software and resources. These additional software and resource requirements will be communicated to you upon registration and/or at the beginning of the course. Please note that Google, Vimeo, and YouTube may be used in our course delivery, and if these services are blocked in your jurisdiction, you may have difficulty in accessing course content. Please check with an Enrolment Advisor before registering for this course if you have any concerns about this affecting your experience with the Online Campus.
