Ethical Machines

Are we dependent on social media in a way that erodes our autonomy? After all, platforms are designed to keep us hooked and to come back for more. And we don’t really know the law of the digital lands, since how the algorithms influence how we relate to each other online in unknown ways. Then again, don’t we bear a certain degree of personal responsibility for how we conduct ourselves, online or otherwise? What the right balance is and how we can encourage or require greater autonomy is our topic of discussion today. Originally aired in season two.

Much of what we find fulfilling in life isn’t the having but the doing. It’s the process of working through a problem, taking action, doing what needs to be done. But that meaning may be on the verge of being greatly diminished; so contends my guest, Sven Nyholm, Professor of Ethics of AI at lMU MUNICH. I push back in various ways: how real and/or imminent is this threat, really? And who is responsible for staving it off?

Anthropic just got the axe from the U.S. government for refusing to allow the Department of Defense (War?) to use Claude for autonomous weapons systems and mass surveillance. For the first 15 minutes of this conversation with Michael Horowitz - professor at UPenn, Senior Fellow for Technology and Innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations, and formerly Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development and Emerging Capabilities and Director of the Emerging Capabilities Policy Office at the DoD - we talk explicitly about Anthropic vs. the U.S. government. Why Anthropic did it, why this is more about personality than policy, and more. In the remaining 45 minutes you’ll hear a replay of an episode Michael and I did back in October, in which Michael defends the functional and ethical importance of potentially using AI for autonomous weapons systems.

What does it look like for a non-technologist to lead Responsible AI practices at a Fortune 500 company? Today I talk with James Desir, Senior corporate counsel at Progressive Insurance and a key leader in their RAI efforts. We discuss how he found his way into this space, how he persuades data scientists to treat him as a thought partner instead of a blocker, and how to demonstrate the ROI of RAI to fellow executives. We also talk about the increasing complexity of AI and how a small RAI team can handle the scale of the problem.

I tend to dismiss claims about existential risks from AI, but my guest thinks I - or rather we - need to take it very seriously. His name is Olle Häggström and he’s a professor of mathematical statistics at Chalmers University of Technology in, Sweden, and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He argues that if AI becomes more intelligent than us, and it will, then it will dominate us in much the way we dominate other species. But it’s not too late! We can and we must, he argues, change the trajectory of how we develop AI.

We hear that “writing is thinking.” We believe that teaching all students to be great writers is important. All hail the essay! But my guest, philosopher Luciano Floridi, professor and Founding Director of the Digital Ethics Center, sees things differently. Plenty of great thinkers were not also great writers. We should prioritize thoughtful and rigorous dialogue over the written word. As for writing, perhaps it should be considered akin to a musical instrument; not everyone has to learn the violin…

We’ve been doing risk assessments in lots of industries for decades. For instance, in financial services and cyber security and aviation, there are lots of ways of thinking about what the risks are and how to mitigate them at both a microscopic and microscopic level. My guest today, Jason, Stanley of Service now, is probably the smartest person I’ve talked to on this topic. We discussed the three levels of AI risk and the lessons he draws from those other industries that we crucially need in the AI space.

Many researchers in AI think we should make AI capable of ethical inquiry. We can’t teach it all the ethical rules; that’s impossible. Instead, we should teach it to ethically reason, just as we do children. But my guest thinks this strategy makes a number of controversial assumptions, including how ethics works and what actually is right and wrong. From the best of season two. 

AI is deployed across the globe. But how sensitive is it to the cultural contexts - ethics, norms, laws and regulations - in which it finds itself. My guest today, Rocky Clancy of Virginia Tech, argues that AI is too Western-focused. We need to engage in empirical research so that AI is developed in a way that comports with the people it interacts with, wherever they are.

When we’re playing a game or a sport, we like being measured. We want a high score, we want to beat the game. Measurement makes it fun. But in work, being measured, hitting our numbers, can make us miserable. Why does measuring ourselves sometimes enhance and sometimes undermine our happiness and sense of fulfillment? That’s the question C. Thi Nguyen tackles in his new book “The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.” Thi is one of the most interesting philosophers I know - enjoy!