Are we losing our liberty as a result of digital technologies and algorithmic power? In particular, might algorithmically curated filter bubbles be creating a world that encourages both increased polarisation and increased conformity at the same time? In today’s podcast, I discuss these issues with Henrik Skaug Sætra. Henrik is a political scientist working in the Faculty of Business, Languages and Social Science at Østfold University College in Norway. He has a particular interest in political theory and philosophy, and has worked extensively on Thomas Hobbes and social contract theory, environmental ethics and game theory. At the moment his work focuses mainly on issues involving the dynamics between human individuals, society and technology.

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Topics discussed include:

Do our values change over time? What role do emotions and technology play in altering our values? In this episode I talk to Steffen Steinert about these issues. Steffen is a postdoctoral researcher on the Value Change project at TU Delft, Ph.D. His research focuses on the philosophy of technology, ethics of technology, emotions, and aesthetics. He has published papers on roboethics, art and technology, and philosophy of science. In his previous research he also explored philosophical issues related to humor and amusement.

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).

Topics discussed include:

• What is a value?
• Descriptive vs normative theories of value
• Psychological theories of personal values
• The nature of emotions
• The connection between emotions and values
• Emotional contagion
• Emotional climates vs emotional atmospheres
• The role of social media in causing emotional contagion
• Is the coronavirus promoting a negative emotional climate?
• Will this affect our political preferences and policies?
• General lessons for technology and value change

• Steffen’s Homepage
• The Designing for Changing Values Project @ TU Delft
• Corona and Value Change by Steffen
• ‘Unleashing the Constructive Potential of Emotions’ by Steffen and Sabine Roeser
• An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Personal Values

Are you being watched, tracked and traced every minute of the day? Probably. The digital world thrives on surveillance. What should we do about this? My guest today is Carissa Véliz. Carissa is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute of Ethics in AI at Oxford University. She is also a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College Oxford. She works on privacy, technology, moral and political philosophy and public policy. She has also been a guest on this podcast on two previous occasions. Today, we’ll be talking about her recently published book Privacy is Power.

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). 

Topics discussed in this show include:

• The most surprising examples of digital surveillance
• The nature of privacy
• Is privacy dead?
• Privacy as an intrinsic and instrumental value
• The relationship between privacy and autonomy
• Does surveillance help with security and health?
• The problem with mass surveillance
• The phenomenon of toxic data
• How surveillance undermines democracy and freedom
• Are we willing to trade privacy for convenient services?
• And much more

• Carissa’s Webpage
• Privacy is Power by Carissa
• Summary of Privacy is Power in Aeon
• Review of Privacy is Power in The Guardian
• Carissa’s Twitter feed (a treasure trove of links about privacy and surveillance)
• Views on Privacy: A Survey by Sian Brooke and Carissa Véliz
• Data, Privacy and the Individual by Carissa Véliz

Facial recognition technology has seen its fair share of both media and popular attention in the past 12 months. The runs the gamut from controversial uses by governments and police forces, to coordinated campaigns to ban or limit its use. What should we do about it? In this episode, I talk to Brenda Leong about this issue. Brenda is Senior Counsel and Director of Artificial Intelligence and Ethics at Future of Privacy Forum. She manages the FPF portfolio on biometrics, particularly facial recognition. She authored the FPF Privacy Expert’s Guide to AI, and co-authored the paper, “Beyond Explainability: A Practical Guide to Managing Risk in Machine Learning Models.” Prior to working at FPF, Brenda served in the U.S. Air Force.

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

Topics discussed include:

In today’s episode, I talk to Nikita Aggarwal about the legal and regulatory aspects of AI and algorithmic governance. We focus, in particular, on three topics: (i) algorithmic credit scoring; (ii) the problem of ‘too big to fail’ tech platforms and (iii) AI crime. Nikita is a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the Faculty of Law at Oxford, as well as a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Digital Ethics Lab. Her research examines the legal and ethical challenges due to emerging, data-driven technologies, with a particular focus on machine learning in consumer lending. Prior to entering academia, she was an attorney in the legal department of the International Monetary Fund, where she advised on financial sector law reform in the Euro area.

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

Topics discussed include:

• The digitisation, datafication and disintermediation of consumer credit markets

• Algorithmic credit scoring

• The problems of risk and bias in credit scoring

• How law and regulation can address these problems

• Tech platforms that are too big to fail

• What should we do if Facebook fails?

• The forms of AI crime

• How to address the problem of AI crime

• Nikita’s homepage

• Nikita on Twitter

• ‘The Norms of Algorithmic Credit Scoring’ by Nikita

• ‘What if Facebook Goes Down? Ethical and Legal Considerations for the Demise of Big Tech Platforms‘ by Carl Ohman and Nikita

• ‘Artificial Intelligence Crime: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Foreseeable Threats and Solutions‘ by Thomas King, Nikita, Mariarosario Taddeo and Luciano Floridi

What happens if an autonomous machine does something wrong? Who, if anyone, should be held responsible for the machine’s actions? That’s the topic I discuss in this episode with Daniel Tigard. Daniel Tigard is a Senior Research Associate in the Institute for History & Ethics of Medicine, at the Technical University of Munich. His current work addresses issues of moral responsibility in emerging technology. He is the author of several papers on moral distress and responsibility in medical ethics as well as, more recently, papers on moral responsibility and autonomous systems.

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).

Topics discussed include:

If an AI system makes a decision, should its reasons for making that decision be explainable to you? In this episode, I chat to Scott Robbins about this issue. Scott is currently completing his PhD in the ethics of artificial intelligence at the Technical University of Delft. He has a B.Sc. in Computer Science from California State University, Chico and an M.Sc. in Ethics of Technology from the University of Twente. He is a founding member of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and a member of the 4TU Centre for Ethics and Technology. Scott is skeptical of AI as a grand solution to societal problems and argues that AI should be boring.

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).

Topic covered include:

How do we get back to normal after the COVID-19 pandemic? One suggestion is that we use increased amounts of surveillance and tracking to identify and isolate infected and at-risk persons. While this might be a valid public health strategy it does raise some tricky ethical questions. In this episode I talk to Carissa Véliz about these questions. Carissa is a Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, also at Oxford. She is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics as well as two forthcoming solo-authored books Privacy is Power (Transworld) and The Ethics of Privacy (Oxford University Press).

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).

Topics discussed include

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? 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).

Topics discussed include…

I’m still thinking a lot about the COVID-19 pandemic. In this episode I turn away from some of the ‘classical’ ethical questions about the disease and talk more about how to understand it and form reasonable beliefs about the public health information that has been issued in response to it. To help me do this I will be talking to Katherine Furman. Katherine is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests are at the intersection of Philosophy and Health Policy. She is interested in how laypeople understand issues of science, objectivity in the sciences and social sciences, and public trust in science. Her previous work has focused on the HIV/AIDs pandemic and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-2015. We will be talking about the lessons we can draw from this work for how we think about the COVID-19 pandemic.

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).

Topics discussed include: