Responsibility Seminar: IÉSEG prepares its 1st-year students for artificial intelligence
08/30/2019
Every year, IÉSEG organizes a seminar with a corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related pedagogical challenge during the first week of the academic year for new students in the first year of the Grande Ecole Program. This seminar aims to increase students’ awareness about the impact of their actions on society and in the world in general. It also sensitizes them to issues relating to ethics and social responsibility, all the while teaching them to work collectively.
On August 27 in Lille and August 28 in Paris, around 1,000 students participated in this challenge on the theme of artificial intelligence.
Divided into groups 8 to 12, their mission was to propose concrete applications of artificial intelligence, by imagining how their future company could potentially use it. In order to do this, each student had a particular role: writer, information collector, presenter, monitor/manager of the ethical dimension of the project, innovation manager, and general program administrator.
Together, they worked on five themes related to artificial intelligence: 1) ethics, 2) the different uses of AI, 3) regulation, 4) organization of work, 5) emotional intelligence.
Each group thought about different applications of artificial intelligence, its limits, its consequences related to the organization and production of work, its social and ethical impact, etc.
Each group had the possibility of obtaining additional information through access to a decentralized headquarters, made up of professors and students of other years from the program, where they could ask questions if needed in order to go about their mission.
At the end of the activity, the teams turned in their recommendations and presented their results in front of a jury made up of professors and two students. This jury chose the six winning teams on each campus, and awarded a “special prize” to two additional teams.
“Artificial intelligence is a phenomenon that affects companies, as well as society as whole. This year, we have chosen to work with this subject that is revolutionizing the daily life of companies. The objective is to encourage students to take into account the benefits and risks associated with its use. It is very important that these future leaders be aware of the ethical considerations related to this technology, for, once we remove sensitivity from the notion of intelligence, we can be confronted with ethical problems.”
