AI Ethics
I put this at #37 because Coeckelbergh keeps AI ethics close to responsibility, power, work, relationships, and the stories told about technology. It belongs among the engineering books so that a system’s moral questions arrive before deployment, not as a paragraph added after it.
The long version
Mark Coeckelbergh introduces the main ethical questions raised by artificial intelligence: responsibility, bias, privacy, work, relationships, power, surveillance, autonomous weapons, and the stories through which societies imagine machines and themselves. Rather than treating ethics as a list of abstract dilemmas, he emphasizes practices, institutions, language, and unequal consequences. The book asks not only whether a machine can make a moral decision, but who designs the setting, who benefits, who bears the risk, and who can contest the result.
Why it is here
This belongs among the technical AI books, not after them. It gives engineering decisions a social vocabulary before deployment makes those decisions expensive to reverse. I keep it because responsibility should not disappear into the passive sentence ‘the model decided.’
How to read it
Attach each chapter to one system you use or build. Name the affected people, the decision owner, the evidence, the appeal path, and the harm that a success metric might hide. End with one design change rather than a general promise to be ethical.
What it taught me
- 01
AI ethics concerns institutions and power as much as the behaviour of an individual system.
- 02
Responsibility can become obscured when design, data, deployment, and use are divided across many actors.
- 03
Stories and metaphors about intelligent machines shape which futures appear natural or inevitable.
Before and after
What makes it easier
More about the author
Mark Coeckelbergh is a Belgian philosopher of technology whose work examines artificial intelligence, robotics, climate, language, and the relation between technology and human life.
More by the same hand
The Political Philosophy of AI
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Introduction to Philosophy of Technology
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Green Leviathan or the Poetics of Political Liberty
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