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(CANCELED) HAI Weekly Seminar with Blake Lemoine - Artificial Ethics and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Event Details

Friday, January 17, 2020
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. PST

Event Type

Due to some unforeseen circumstances we regretfully have to cancel this event. We hope to schedule this talk at a later date.

We must separate the technical endeavor of imbuing artificial systems with moral agency from philosophical questions about the ethics of doing so. Both are important ventures but they are distinct and the nature of the latter is dependent on the nature of the former. Failure to separate these two might lead to much wasted time reasoning about the ethics of technologies which will never or could never be created. However, in the context of a specific system engaged in artificial ethics, meaningful philosophical work can be done. To provide a guiding example, this talk sets out an abstract framework for creating an artificial system with moral agency based on dynamic systems theory. The framework itself is speculative but it is plausible and, more importantly, concrete enough to ground philosophical work in. Using that design, philosophical questions are posed directly relevant to that system. Mechanisms by which different people with different value systems might go about answering these questions will be outlined. Finally, this talk is not completely abstract but, in fact, directly informs the speaker’s approach to writing ISO AI standards on ethically building artificially intelligent systems. It concludes with an introduction to how those standards are taking shape and how people interested in the topic can contribute.