Link to the 2019-2020 Series

Human societies have, historically, undergone a number of moral revolutions. Some of these have been precipitated by technological changes. Will the integration of AI and robotics into our social lives precipitate a new moral revolution? In this keynote, I will look at the history of moral revolutions and the role of techno-social change in facilitating those revolutions. I will examine the structural properties of human moral systems and how those properties might be affected by social robots. I will argue that much of our current social morality is agency-centric and that AI and robots, as non-standard agents, will disrupt that model. This disruption has moral and practical significance.

John Danaher is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway. He is the author of Automation and Utopia (Harvard University Press, 2019), co-author of A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press 2021) and coeditor of Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications (MIT Press 2017). He has published dozens of papers on topics including the risks of advanced AI, the meaning of life and the future of work, the ethics of human enhancement, the intersection of law and neuroscience, the utility of brain-based lie detection, and the philosophy of religion.

Dans cette conférence qui reprend plusieurs éléments du livre Faire la morale aux robots : une introduction à l’éthique des algorithmes (2020), je m’interroge sur la meilleure manière de programmer un agent moral artificiel. Qu’est-ce qu’un bon robot? Comment devrait-il se comporter dans une situation délicate et dans quelle mesure les théories morales traditionnelles peuvent-elles se traduire en algorithmes? Je soutiendrai que c’est l’éthique de la vertu qui, combinée à cette technique d’IA qu’est l'apprentissage supervisé, semble la plus apte à donner des robots fiables, neutres sur le plan métaéthique, et dignes de confiance.

Martin Gibert est chercheur en éthique de l’IA à l’Université de Montréal, affilié à l’Institut de valorisation des données (IVADO) et au Centre de Recherche en Éthique (CRÉ). Il a publié l'Imagination en morale, Voir son steak comme un animal mort et Faire la morale aux robots ainsi que plusieurs articles en éthique et psychologie morale disponibles sur sa page web. Son blogue : la Quatrième Blessure.

In this talk I will explore what privacy is; how it relates to power, liberal democracy, and individual wellbeing; how digital technology has disrupted our privacy, why it matters, and what can we do about it.

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, as well as a fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She works on privacy, technology, moral and political philosophy, and public policy. She is the author of Privacy Is Power (Bantam Press 2020), and the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics.

Like Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds, 70% of views on YouTube result from algorithmic recommendations. On social medias, most of what billions of individuals are exposed to on a daily basis is decided by today’s most sophisticated AI systems. This has been argued to lead to large-scale concerns, in terms of misinformation, polarization, outrage, narcissism, suicide and addiction, to name a few. In this talk, however, I will argue that recommendation algorithms can also be regarded as a promising opportunity to do a large amount of good, e.g., by promoting quality information, therapeutic contents and epistemic hygiene. Unfortunately, this opportunity will require solving major philosophical, social and technological challenges. I will discuss these challenges, as well as promising research directions to make recommendation algorithms robustly beneficial for humanity.

After obtaining an engineering degree from the École Polytechnique in Paris, Lê Nguyên Hoang received a PhD from Polytechnique Montreal, and then became a postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He then took the lead on e-learning and science communication projects at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He also runs the YouTube channel Science4All, which has nearly 200k subscribers. He authored the books "The equation of knowledge", "Le fabuleux chantier" (with El Mahdi El Mhamdi) and "Turing à la plage" (with Rachid Guerraoui).

In this talk, Dr. Schneider will discuss whether consciousness is an unavoidable byproduct of sophisticated intelligence, and consider certain overlooked ethical and social implications of creating machine minds.

Dr. Schneider is the founding director of the new Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). She writes about the nature of the self and mind, especially from the vantage point of issues in philosophy, AI, cognitive science and astrobiology. In her recent book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of the Mind, she discusses the philosophical implications of AI, and, in particular, the enterprise of "mind design." As the NASA chair, Schneider has recently completed a two year project with NASA on the future of intelligence. She now works with Congress on AI policy. She also appears frequently on television shows on stations such as PBS and The History Channel (see below for clips). She writes opinion pieces for the New York Times, Scientific American and The Financial Times. Her work has been widely discussed in the media. She is currently working on a new book on the shape of intelligent systems (with W.W. Norton).

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