Ethical Machines

How much control should AI have when your enemy has AI too?

Jeremy Kofsky is a 20-year Marine with small-unit operational experience on five continents. Over his 12 deployments, he has conducted combat operations, provided tactical to strategic level intelligence, and seen the growth of Artificial Intelligence in the military sphere. He conducts Artificial Intelligence work for the Key Terrain Cyber Institute as a 2nd Lt J.P. Blecksmith Research Fellow. Recently he completed the Brute Krulak Scholar Program as the first ever enlisted member to complete the year-long process.

We're all familiar with cybersecurity threats. Stories of companies being hacked and data and secrets being stolen abound. Now we have generative AI to throw fuel on the fire.

I don't know much about cybersecurity, but Matthew does. In this conversation, he provides some fun and scary stories about how hackers have operated in the past, how they can leverage genAI to get access to things they shouldn't have access to, and what cybersecurity professionals are doing to slow them down.

When you think about AI in the criminal justice system, you probably think either about biased AI or mass surveillance. This episode focuses on the latter and takes up the following challenge: can we integrate AI into the criminal justice system without realizing the nightmarish picture provided by the film “Minority Report.”

Explaining what that vision is and why it’s important is the goal of my guest, professor of law, and my good friend, Guha Krishnamurthi.

My conversation with Chris covered everything from government to corporate surveillance to why we should care about data privacy to the power that technologists have and how they should wield it responsibly. Always great to chat with Chris (we’ve been talking about this for 5 years now) and nice to bring it to a larger audience.

Chris Wiggins is an associate professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics and the chief data scientist at The New York Times. He is a member of Columbia’s Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering, a founding member of the University’s Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the co-founder of hackNY, a New York City-based initiative seeking “to create and empower a community of student-technologists.”

The hospital faced an ethical question: should we deploy robots to help with elder care?

Let’s look at a standard list of AI ethics values: justice/fairness, privacy, transparency, accountability, explainability.

But as Ami points out in our conversation, that standard list doesn’t include a core value at the hospital: the value of caring.

And that’s one example of one of three objections to a view he calls “Principalism.” Principalism is the view that we do AI ethics best by first defining our AI ethics values or principles at that very abstract level. This objection is that the list will always be incomplete.

Given Ami’s expertise in ethics and experience as a clinical ethicist, it was insightful to see how he gets ethics done on the ground and his views on how organizations should approach ethics more generally.

Ami Palmer received his PhD in philosophy from Bowling Green State University where he wrote his dissertation on the challenges conspiricism and science denialism pose to democratic policymaking. His primary research areas include the effects of medical misinformation on clinical interactions and the ethics of AI in healthcare. With respect to medical misinformation he has recently developed a conversation guide to help providers better navigate conversations with patients who endorse medical misinformation. In the ethics of AI, he coauthored the American Nursing Association's Position Statement of the Ethics of AI in Nursing. His hobbies include judo, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, dance, and hiking with his 4 wiener dogs.

Well, I didn’t see this coming. Talking about legal and philosophical conceptions of copyright turns out to be intellectually fascinating and challenging. It involves not only concepts about property and theft, but also about personhood and invasiveness. Could it be that training AI with author/artist work violates their self?


I talked with Darren Hick about all this, who wrote a few books on the topic. I definitely didn’t think he was going to bring up Hegel.

Darren Hudson Hick is an assistant professor of philosophy at Furman University, specializing in philosophical issues in copyright, forgery, authorship, and related areas. He is the author of Artistic License: The Philosophical Problems of Copyright and Appropriation (Chicago, 2017) and Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Bloomsbury, 2023), and the co-editor of The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying (Bloomsbury, 2016). Dr. Hick gained significant media attention as one of the first professors to catch a student using ChatGPT to plagiarize an assignment.

Are you on the political left or the political right? Ben Steyn wants to ask you the same question with regards to nature and technology. Do you lean tech or do you lean nature?

For instance, what do you think about growing human babies outside of a womb (aka ectogenesis)? Are you inclined to find it an affront to nature and you want politicians to make it illegal? Are you inclined to find it a tech wonder and you want to make sure elected officials don’t ban such a thing?

Ben claims that nature vs. tech leanings don’t map on nicely to the political left vs right distinction. We need a new axis by which we evaluate our politicians.

Really thought-provoking conversation - enjoy!

Before I did AI ethics, I was a philosophy professor, specializing in ethics. One of my senior colleagues in the field was David Enoch, also an ethicist and philosopher of law. David is also Israeli and a long-time supporter of a two-state solution. In fact, he went to military jail for refusing to serve in Gaza for ethical reasons.

Given David’s rare, if not unique, combination of expertise and experience, I wanted to have a conversation with him about the Israeli-Hamas war. In the face of the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7, what is it ethically permissible for Israel to do?

David rejects both extremes. It’s not the case that Israel should be pacifist. That would be for Israel to default on its obligations to safeguard its citizens. Nor should Israel bomb Gaza and its people out of existence; that would be to engage in genocide.

If you’re looking for an “Israel is the best and does nothing wrong” conversation, you won’t find it here. If you’re looking for “Israel is the worst and should drop their weapons and go home,” you won’t find that here, either. It’s a complex situation. David and I do our best to navigate it as best we can.

We want to create AI that makes accurate predictions. We want that not only because we want our products to work, but also because reliable products are, all else equal, ethically safe products.

But we can’t always know whether our AI is accurate. Our ignorance leaves us with a question: which of the various AI models that we’ve developed is the right one for this particular use case?

In some circumstances, we might decide that using AI isn’t the right call. We just don’t know enough. In other instances, we may know enough, but we also have to choose our model in light of the ethical values we’re trying to achieve.

Julia and I talk about this and a lot of other (ethical) problems that beset AI practitioners on the ground, and what can and cannot be done about it.

Dr. Julia Stoyanovich is Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and of Data Science, and Director of the Center for Responsible AI at NYU.  Her goal is to make “responsible AI” synonymous with “AI”.  Julia has co-authored over 100 academic publications, and has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Le Monde.  She engages in technology policy, has been teaching responsible AI to students, practitioners and the public, and has co-authored comic books on this topic. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University.

If I look inside your head when you’re talking, I’ll see various neurons lighting up, probably in the prefrontal cortex as you engage in the reasoning that’s necessary to say whatever it is you’re saying. But if I opened your head and instead found a record playing and no brain, I’d realize I was dealing with a puppet, not a person with a brain/intellect.

In both cases you’re saying the same things (let’s suppose). But because of what’s going on in the head, or “under the hood,” it’s clear there’s intelligence in the first case and not in the second.

Does an LLM (large language models like GPT or Bard) have intelligence. Well, to know that we need to look under the hood, as Lisa Titus argues. It’s not impossible that AI could be intelligent, she says, but judging by what’s going on under the hood at the moment, it’s not.

Fascinating discussion about the nature of intelligence, why we attribute it to each other (mostly), and why we shouldn’t attribute it to AI.

Lisa Titus (née Lisa Miracchi) is a tenured Associate Professor of Philosophy at the ⁠University of Denver⁠.

Previously, she was a tenured Associate Professor of Philosophy at the ⁠University of Pennsylvania⁠, where she was also a General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (⁠GRASP⁠) Lab affiliate and a ⁠MindCORE⁠ affiliate.

She works on issues regarding mind and intelligence. What makes intelligent systems different from other kinds of systems? What kinds of explanations of intelligent systems are possible, or most important? What are appropriate conceptions of real-world intelligent capacities like those for agency, knowledge, and rationality? How can conceptual clarity on these issues advance cognitive science and aid in the effective and ethical development and application of AI and robotic systems? Her work draws together diverse literatures in the cognitive sciences, AI, robotics, epistemology, ethics, law, and policy to systematically address these questions.