Philosophical Disquisitions

How do we make sure that an AI does the right thing? How could we do this when we ourselves don't even agree on what the right thing might be? In this episode, I talk to Iason Gabriel about these questions. Iason is a political theorist and ethicist currently working as a Research Scientist at DeepMind. His research focuses on the moral questions raised by artificial intelligence. His recent work addresses the challenge of value alignment, responsible innovation, and human rights. He has also been a prominent contributor to the debate about the ethics of effective altruism.

You can download the episode here or listen below. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify and other podcasting services (the RSS feed is here).

Show Notes:

Topics discussed include:

• What is the value alignment problem?
• Why is it so important that we get value alignment right?
• Different ways of conceiving the problem
• How different AI architectures affect the problem
• Why there can be no purely technical solution to the value alignment problem
• Six potential solutions to the value alignment problem
• Why we need to deal with value pluralism and uncertainty
• How political theory can help to resolve the problem

Relevant Links

• Iason on Twitter
• "Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment" by Iason
• "Effective Altruism and its Critics" by Iason
• My blog series on the above article
• "Social Choice Ethics in Artificial Intelligence" by Seth Baum

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In this episode I talk to Phil Torres. Phil is an author and researcher who primarily focuses on existential risk. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University. He has published widely on emerging technologies, terrorism, and existential risks, with articles appearing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Futures, Erkenntnis, Metaphilosophy, Foresight, Journal of Future Studies, and the Journal of Evolution and Technology. He is the author of several books, including most recently Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks. We talk about the problem of apocalyptic terrorists, the proliferation dual-use technology and the governance problem that arises as a result. This is both a fascinating and potentially terrifying discussion.
You can download the episode here or listen below. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and a variety of other podcasting services (the RSS feed is here).

Show Notes

• 0:00 – Introduction
• 3:14 – What is existential risk? Why should we care?
• 8:34 – The four types of agential risk/omnicidal terrorists
• 17:51 – Are there really omnicidal terror agents?
• 20:45 – How dual-use technology give apocalyptic terror agents the means to their desired ends
• 27:54 – How technological civilisation is uniquely vulernable to omnicidal agents
• 32:00 – Why not just stop creating dangerous technologies?
• 36:47 – Making the case for mass surveillance
• 41:08 – Why mass surveillance must be asymmetrical
• 45:02 – Mass surveillance, the problem of false positives and dystopian governance
• 56:25 – Making the case for benevolent superintelligent governance
• 1:02:51 – Why advocate for something so fantastical?
• 1:06:42 – Is an anti-tech solution any more fantastical than a benevolent AI solution?
• 1:10:20 – Does it all just come down to values: are you a techno-optimist or a techno-pessimist?

Relevant Links

• Phil’s webpage
• ‘Superintelligence and the Future of Governance: On Prioritizing the Control Problem at the End of History’ by Phil
• Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks by Phil
• ‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis” by Nick Bostrom
• Phil’s comparison of his paper with Bostrom’s paper
• The Guardian orders the small-pox genome
• Slaughterbots
• The Future of Violence by Ben Wittes and Gabriela Blum
• Future Crimes by Marc Goodman
• The Dyn Cyberattack
• Autonomous Technology by Langdon Winner
• 'Biotechnology and the Lifetime of Technological Civilisations’ by JG Sotos
• The God Machine Thought Experiment (Persson and Savulescu)

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In this episode I chat to Matthias Uhl. Matthias is a professor of the social and ethical implications of AI at the Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt. Matthias is a behavioural scientist that has been doing a lot of work on human-AI/Robot interaction. He focuses, in particular, on applying some of the insights and methodologies of behavioural economics to these questions. We talk about three recent studies he and his collaborators have run revealing interesting quirks in how humans relate to AI decision-making systems. In particular, his findings suggesting that people do outsource responsibility to machines, are willing to trust untrustworthy machines and prefer the messy discretion of human decision-makers over the precise logic of machines. Matthias's research is fascinating and has some important implications for people working in AI ethics and policy.

You can download the episode here or listen below. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify and other podcasting services (the RSS feed is here).

Relevant Links

• Matthias's Faculty Page
• 'Hiding Behind Machines: Artificial Agents May Help to Evade Punishment' by Matthias and colleagues
• 'Zombies in the Loop? Humans Trust Untrustworthy AI-Advisors for Ethical Decisions' by Matthias and colleagues
• 'People Prefer Moral Discretion to Algorithms: Algorithm Aversion Beyond Intransparency' by Matthias and colleagues

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Can we move beyond the Aristotelian account of friendship when thinking about our relationships with robots? Can we hate robots? In this episode, I talk to Helen Ryland about these topics. Helen is a UK-based philosopher. She completed her PhD in Philosophy in 2020 at the University of Birmingham. She now works as an Associate Lecturer for The Open University. Her work examines human-robot relationships, video game ethics, and the personhood and moral status of marginal cases of human rights (e.g., subjects with dementia, nonhuman animals, and robots).

You can download the episode here or listen below. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify and other podcasting services (the RSS feed is here).

Show Notes

Topics covered include:

• What is friendship and why does it matter?
• The Aristotelian account of friendship
• Limitations of the Aristotelian account
• Moving beyond Aristotle
• The degrees of friendship model
• Why we can be friends with robots
• Criticisms of robot-human friendship
• The possibility of hating robots
• Do we already hate robots?
• Why would it matter if we did hate robots?

Relevant Links

• Helen's homepage
• 'It's Friendship Jim, But Not as We Know It: A Degrees-of-Friendship View of Human–Robot Friendships' by Helen
• Could you hate a robot? Does it matter if you could? by Helen

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There is a lot of data and reporting out there about the COVID 19 pandemic. How should we make sense of that data? Do the media narratives misrepresent or mislead us as to the true risks associated with the disease? Have governments mishandled the response? Can they be morally blamed for what they have done. These are the questions I discuss with my guest on today's show: David Shaw. David is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Basel and an Assistant Professor at the Care and Public Health Research Institute, Maastricht University. We discuss some recent writing David has been doing on the Journal of Medical Ethics blog about the coronavirus crisis.
You can download the episode here or listen below. You can also subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Stitcher and a range of other podcasting services (the RSS feed is here).

Show Notes

Topics discussed include...

• Why is it important to keep death rates and other data in context?
• Is media reporting of deaths misleading?
• Why do the media discuss 'soaring' death rates and 'grim' statistics?
• Are we ignoring the unintended health consequences of COVID 19?
• Should we take the economic costs more seriously given the link between poverty/inequality and health outcomes?
• Did the UK government mishandle the response to the crisis? Are they blameworthy for what they did?
• Is it fair to criticise governments for their handling of the crisis?
• Is it okay for governments to experiment on their populations in response to the crisis?

Relevant Links

• David's Profile Page at the University of Basel
• 'The Vital Contexts of Coronavirus' by David
• 'The Slow Dragon and the Dim Sloth: What can the world learn from coronavirus responses in Italy and the UK?' by Marcello Ienca and David Shaw
• 'Don't let the ethics of despair infect the ICU' by David Shaw, Dan Harvey and Dale Gardiner
• 'Deaths in New York City Are More Than Double the Usual Total' in the NYT (getting the context right?!)
• Preliminary results from German Antibody tests in one town: 14% of the population infected
• Do Death Rates Go Down in a Recession?
• The Sun's Good Friday headline

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