Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence have generated a lot of public anxiety, especially regarding ethical issues: data bias, privacy, the opacity of automated decisions, the effects of algorithmic bubbles on democratic debate, not to mention the harms caused by deep fakes – the list goes on. In response, the emerging field of AI ethics aspires to address these issues.

The expert panel of this year's Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Symposium, chaired by award-winning journalist Ritula Shah (formerly at the BBC), discuss these issues and more, thinking of ways we might address them.

The Panel:
Mark Coeckelbergh, Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Philosophy of Department of the University of Vienna.

Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy.

Linda Eggert, Early Career Research Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy, at Balliol College, and the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford.

Allan Dafoe is a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind leading work on Frontier Safety and Governance.

Ritula Shah (chair) is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. She is the presenter of ‘Calm Classics’ every weekday evening on ClassicFM. Ritula left the BBC in April 2023, after a career spanning almost 35 years.

Find out more about the panel here: https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/event/is-ethical-ai-a-fantasy/

Where should we draw the line between hate speech and simply saying things other people don’t want to hear? When some social groups can access media much more easily than others, has the idea of free speech as a free contest of ideas had its day? Should governments intervene to restrict the right to express opinions – for example, on climate change, or vaccination, which are obviously untrue? Obviously according to whom?

These are among the urgent questions to be addressed by our panel of four distinguished philosophers, chaired by the radio and TV presenter, Ritula Shah.

We make art out of life, but life in turn is remade by art. We are by nature tied to art, and this means, finally, that we can’t really speak of our “nature” at all. We are art’s product. Art is not a late accomplishment of our history, a mere cultural add on. We are entangled with art, and the whole phenomenon of the aesthetic, from the very beginning. If there is to be a science of the human (neuroscience, or cognitive science etc.) it must come to grips with our aesthetic character.

In this talk, Professor Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.