AI for Good and the Bootstrapping Problem – Monash Prato Dialogue

AI for Good and the Bootstrapping Problem – Monash Prato Dialogue

The Monash Prato Dialogue is a Monash Data Futures Institute Distinguished Lecture series on Artificial Intelligence and its impact on society. In this lecture, Professor Shannon Vallor will discuss the ethical challenges and opportunities posed by new uses of data and AI.

REGISTER: https://www.monash.edu/data-futures-institute/news/events/ai-for-good-and-the-bootstrapping-problem-monash-prato-dialogue

About the speaker:

Professor Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence and Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also a Professor in the Department of Philosophy.

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 Professor 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.

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