Ethical Machines

Here are three paradoxes, according to Virginia Dignum, my guest today: 1. The more capable AI becomes, the more it reveals the richness and complexity of human intelligence. 2. Less bias in AI does not necessarily create more justice. 3. The pursuit of artificial superintelligence may ultimately reveal that humanity's greatest intelligence is collective, not artificial. We discuss the limits...

Jonathan Schaeffer thinks we're building AI the wrong way. While large language models have produced remarkable results, he argues that hallucinations, bias, and unreliability aren't bugs that can be fixed—they're consequences of the underlying architecture itself. In his view, LLMs are an important stepping stone, but not the path to the kind of AI we can truly trust. We discuss wheth...

My guest, Mona Sloane, author of Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life, argues that AI has become part of our social infrastructure. Its predictive systems increasingly shape how we work, find information, build relationships, and navigate society. Mona worries that as prediction becomes embedded in more areas of life, we risk becoming less willing to deliberate, challenge assumptions, an...

Science depends on more than just results. It depends on researchers asking questions, testing hypotheses, challenging assumptions, and scrutinizing evidence. My guest, Emily Sullivan, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Science and AI at the University of Edinburgh, argues that AI is beginning to influence every stage of the scientific process—from deciding which questions get asked to how papers ar...

My guest, Fabio Tollon, a postdoctoral researcher on the BRAID programme at the University of Edinburgh, argues that answering that question is more difficult than it first appears. Traditional theories of moral responsibility suggest that people should only be blamed for actions they understand and control. But AI systems seem to challenge both requirements. We discuss responsibility gaps, the pr...

Aligning an AI traditionally looks like a matter of giving it rules to obey. But my guest, Gillian Hadfield, Professor of AI Alignment and Governance at Johns Hopkins University, thinks that’s the wrong approach. She argues that we need to think about what it means to have a normative capacity - an ability to categorize behavior as (un)acceptable in a given context by observing that context - and...

Technologist’s are racing to create AGI, artificial general intelligence. They also say we must align the AGI’s moral values with our own. But Professors Ariela Tubert and Justin Tiehen argue that’s impossible. Once you create an AGI, they say, you also give them the intellectual capacity needed for freedom, including the freedom to reject your given values. Originally aired in season 2. Advertisi...

The Thomson Reuters Foundation recently conducted a global survey and found that most companies are lagging in their attempts to govern AI. For me the most surprising stat is that 85% of companies don’t have any training on AI risks for their employees. I think that’s just insane. Today my guests are Antonio Zappulla, CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Katie Fowler, Director of Responsible...

My guest, Carissa Véliz, is author of the new book “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI.” Her thesis is that when leaders in AI say things like “AI adoption is inevitable,” they’re not making a prediction, but rather giving us a command and attempting to legitimize their power. Is she right? Have a listen! Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.c...

Chapter Six: Dream Teams for Ethical Nightmares Three Types of ENC Teams ENC Teams as Emergency Response Tools for Teams ENC Teams in Bloom Chapter Seven: ENC: An Approach So Flexible It Makes Simone Biles Look Like C-3PO Hands Off! You Do You Marrying ENC to Existing Practices Folding Existing Resources into ENC Teams Folding ENC Teams into Existing Resources The Ethical Nightmare Challenge for.....

Chapter 4: The Standard Approach to Responsible AI Is Crumbling The Standard Approach The Madness in the Method Turn That Smile Upside Down Cats and Tigers, Oh My! Chapter 5: Why I Like Nightmares and You Should, Too The Power of Nightmares What Good Nightmares Look Like And Now the Moment You've Been Waiting For Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Chapter Two: Things Get Complicated with Generative AI So Now We’re Going to Lose My Grandmother, Again The Creators’ Version of a Rough Draft The Creators Align (Kind of) BigBusinessAI The Master Prompter The Changing AI Risk Landscape Chapter Three: Humans Had a Good Run, but Now I Bring You... AI Agents! How to Build an AI Agent AI Agent Ecosystems Agentic Sources of Ethical Nightmares The Clas...

My new book released just two days. It’s about how insanely complex the AI risk landscape has become, why the standard approach to Responsible AI is broken, and develops a novel approach to avoiding the worst of AI. In this episode I offer you the Introduction and Chapter 1 of the audiobook. If you don’t laugh at least once, I consider the book a failure. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.c...

ISO 42001 sounds serious. It's got a serious (and boring) name, it's backed by 60+ countries, and some companies seek ISO 42001 certification. But is the standard any good? Does it actually prevent harms? Can we have generic standards? And how can the standards be flexible enough to account for the fast paced change in the AI world? I’m a bit of a skeptic about all this, but my guest, Patr...

Technologist’s are racing to create AGI, artificial general intelligence. They also say we must align the AGI’s moral values with our own. But Professors Ariela Tubert and Justin Tiehen argue that’s impossible. Once you create an AGI, they say, you also give them the intellectual capacity needed for freedom, including the freedom to reject your given values. Originally aired in season 2. Advertisi...

My guest today, Josh Gellers, Dean at the University of North Florida, argues that AI has more awards. More specifically, he thinks that AI has been used to create new biological organisms that meet the criteria for moral worth. Does that mean that AI itself has moral worth? Should we think that if something is not natural it lacks moral worth? All this and more in today’s episode Advertising Inqu...

My guests today - Professor Kate Vredenburgh and VR specialist Lauren Wong - argue that there are at least two strong reasons for calming down: first, AI isn’t good enough to replace us at our jobs. Second, even if they were, it’s up to us to develop AI in a way that supports rather than replaces us. We also talk about whether AI adoption is suffering for the same reasons the metaverse was never s...

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 o...

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 respon...

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...

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...

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...

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 writ...

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...

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.  Advertising Inquir...