Archive episode [Season 2 Episode 8]: What's wrong with formalising ethics for AI?

Meet special guest Christian Herzog, a researcher at the Institute for Electrical Engineering in Medicine at the University of Lübeck and Head of the Ethical Innovation Hub. Christian recently completed an MA in Applied and Professional Ethics at the IDEA Centre and published two papers based on his research for this course, linked below.

Graham Bex-Priestley interviews Christian about his work on the problems with formalising ethics for implementation in artificial intelligence. What seems at first to be a merely technical issue ends up touching on the contentious topics of inclusive deliberation, moral understanding, relationships of power, and the ideals of democracy. Is there anything wrong with an AI using "deep learning" to essentially trawl the internet and aggregate the moral opinions they find? Christian bounces off Foucault and Habermas to explain what he thinks is missing from such approaches to machine ethics.

Herzog, C. On formal ethics versus inclusive moral deliberation. AI Ethics (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00045-4 

Herzog, C. Three Risks That Caution Against a Premature Implementation of Artificial Moral Agents for Practical and Economical Use. Sci Eng Ethics 27, 3 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00283-z

Released 11 May 2020. Presented by Graham Bex-Priestley.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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