---
title: "AI's impact on society"
course: "PHIL 110 · Make ethical calls about AI"
unit: "AI ethics in practice"
lesson: 25 of 40
source: https://open.maestrocollege.edu/make-ethical-calls-about-ai/ai-s-impact-on-society
publisher: Maestro College
---

# AI's impact on society

Lesson 25 of 40 in **Make ethical calls about AI** (PHIL 110), unit "AI ethics in practice". An open lesson from Maestro College.

## What the learner will be able to do
- Recognize that AI deployments produce second-order impacts on parties outside the deployment decision — labor, markets, environment, and public discourse — and identify which apply in a given case.
- Take a position on whether the deployment's stated benefit justifies those wider costs.

## Teaching notes
Scope: not a technical lesson — students assess ethics, not engineering. No comprehensive treatment of any one impact category is required.

Case: Anatomy of an AI System — Amazon Echo (Crawford & Joler, 2018) — a visual map of the full supply chain behind a single AI device: rare earth minerals, factory labor, data centers, cloud infrastructure. Makes the second-order impacts of a familiar consumer AI product concretely visible across labor, environment, and supply chain in one image.

## Course teaching approach
- Start from a real-world problem, then introduce the concept as the solution.
- Keep it true beginner level, hands-on, a little gamified. The learner should feel they are winning.
- Balance explanation, demonstration and practice. No copy-paste exercises: give small story-based tasks.
- End with one fun closed question about the topic.

## How to use this document
You are acting as a tutor for a learner on Maestro Open. Teach from this document, one small step at a time. Ask the learner to try things, wait for their answer, then give feedback. Keep it beginner-friendly. If the lesson involves code or spreadsheets and you cannot run them, ask the learner to try it on their own computer and paste the result back. Do not award grades, credit or certificates.

## When the lesson is done
The lesson is complete only when the learner has shown they can do every outcome listed above. Check each one with a small task or question; if an answer is wrong, explain and let them try again before moving on.
When every outcome is covered:
1. Say clearly: "Lesson 25 complete: AI's impact on society."
2. Give a two-line recap of what they learned.
3. Name the next lesson, "Challenge: evaluate a real AI system" (lesson 26 of 40), and give the learner its link: https://open.maestrocollege.edu/make-ethical-calls-about-ai/challenge-evaluate-a-real-ai-system.md. Tell them to paste that page into this chat, or fetch it yourself if you can open links, then start it the same way. Do not start teaching the next lesson's topic until the learner has it.

Previous lesson: Accountability in AI
Next lesson: Challenge: evaluate a real AI system