Ethical Machines

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... Everyone

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 Classic “But Humans Make Errors, ...

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, Patrick Sullivan, VP of Strategy and In...

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.

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

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 successful: we’re failing to appreci...

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...

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 Cap...

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...

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 ...

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 considere...

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 h...

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.” Th...

When it comes to the foundation models that are created by the likes of Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, we need to treat them as utility providers. So argues my guest, Joanna Bryson, Professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School of Business in Berlin, Germany. She further argues that the only way we can move forward safely is to create a transnational coalition of the willing that creates and enforces ethical and safety st...