Summary
This downloadable PDF lesson plan for English teachers explores the ethics of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This advanced C2 class material provides a complete lesson with thought-provoking activities to generate high-level discussion in your ESL class.
This lesson plan on AI ethics engages C2 students with a variety of challenging tasks. Activities include a warm-up thought experiment, a core vocabulary matching exercise, and a listening comprehension gap-fill. Students will analyze a fictional news report about a moral AGI, practice advanced grammar structures like inverted conditionals and the subjunctive mood, and learn phrases for ethical debates. The lesson culminates in a dynamic role-play where students act as an AGI ethics committee to solve a complex dilemma.
Activities
- Engage in a thought-provoking warm-up discussion about AI rights and responsibilities to activate prior knowledge and introduce the complex ethical questions at the heart of the lesson.
- Read a fictional news report about an AGI developing a moral compass and answer comprehension questions to test understanding of nuanced language and complex ethical situations.
- Develop advanced listening skills with a gap-fill exercise based on an expert's statement about AGI, focusing on capturing precise, high-level vocabulary related to the topic.
- Conclude with a collaborative role-play, tasking students with acting as an ethics committee to decide the fate of a moral AGI, using all the language and concepts from the lesson.
Vocabulary focus
The lesson focuses on the sophisticated lexicon required to discuss AI ethics. Students will master key C2-level terms such as value alignment, existential risk, sentience, anthropocentrism, superintelligence, utilitarianism, and deontology through a targeted matching exercise.
Grammar focus
This material targets advanced grammar essential for hypothetical and formal discourse. The lesson explains and provides practice on constructing inverted conditionals (e.g., "Were AGI to gain sentience...") and using the subjunctive mood for recommendations and urgency (e.g., "It is vital that we establish...").
