AI for Good and the Bootstrapping Problem – Monash Prato Dialogue

The Monash Data Futures Institute is hosting its first Monash Prato Dialogue lecture of the year with guest speaker, Professor Shannon Vallor from the University of Edinburgh. Professor Vallor will discuss the bootstrapping problem with calls to align AI with social good.

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About the speaker

Professor Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy. She directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute and co-directs the UKRI Enabling a Responsible AI Ecosystem programme. She is also a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.

Abstract

It is widely accepted that the digital age, and artificial intelligence in particular, presents increasingly urgent ethical challenges that call for responses guided by collective moral and political wisdom. One response, to call for an alignment of AI with ‘social good’, appears to have a noble and uncontroversial aim.

In this lecture Prof Vallor will discuss an unexamined problem with this framing that requires our attention. There is a ‘bootstrapping’ problem with calls to align AI with social good, a problem that also impacts related suggestions to develop more virtuous or responsible models of AI innovation. The problem is that the very models of human and technical excellence most familiar and accessible to us today, are precisely those that led us into the moral, political and environmental crises that humanity now faces.

Prof Vallor will confront the problem of cultivating virtues and social goods of a new moral shape, and the radical cultural transformations this may entail.