Jaahred Thomas is a VC friend of mine who wanted to talk about the evolving landscape of AI ethics in startups and business generally. So rather than have a normal conversation like people do, we made it an episode! Jaahred asks me a bunch of questions about AI ethics and startups, investors, Fortune 500 companies, and more, and I tell him the unvarnished truths about where corporate America is in the AI ethics journey and what startup founders should and shouldn’t spend their time doing.

From the best of season 1: The hospital faced an ethical question: should we deploy robots to help with elder care?Let’s look at a standard list of AI ethics values: justice/fairness, privacy, transparency, accountability, explainability. But as Ami points out in our conversation, that standard list doesn’t include a core value at the hospital: the value of caring.And that’s one example of one of three objections to a view he calls “Principalism.” Principalism is the view that we do AI ethics best by first defining our AI ethics values or principles at that very abstract level. This objection is that the list will always be incomplete.Given Ami’s expertise in ethics and experience as a clinical ethicist, it was insightful to see how he gets ethics done on the ground and his views on how organizations should approach ethics more generally.

Lee Vinsel, a professor at Virginia Tech specializing in innovation and technology, shares valuable insights on the pitfalls of innovation hype. He argues that overhyping technology can cloud rational decision-making for leaders. Vinsel advocates for reactive regulations instead of proactive ones, citing our difficulty in predicting tech applications accurately. He highlights the dual nature of emerging technologies, urging critical assessments over sensationalism, while drawing parallels to historical regulatory responses, emphasizing a balanced approach to innovation and regulation.

“Sustainability,” “purpose/mission/value driven”, “human-centric design.” These are terms companies use so they don’t have to say “ethics.” My contention is that this is bad for business and bad for society at large. Our world, corporate and otherwise, is confronted with a growing mountain of ethical problems, spurred on by technologies that bring us fresh new ways of realizing our familiar ethical nightmares. These issues do not disappear via semantic legerdemain. We need to name our problems accurately if we are to address them effectively.

Ted Lechterman, UNESCO Chair in AI Ethics and Governance at IE University, dives deep into the intersection of AI and democracy. He argues that current discussions are too narrow, overlooking critical power dynamics affecting democratic engagement. The conversation challenges misconceptions about AI’s impact, drawing parallels between media influence and public opinion. Lechterman emphasizes the need for genuine stakeholder participation in AI development and advocates for a broader dialogue about ethics and inclusivity in our democratic processes.

From the best of season 1. Well, I didn’t see this coming. Talking about legal and philosophical conceptions of copyright turns out to be intellectually fascinating and challenging. It involves not only concepts about property and theft, but also about personhood and invasiveness. Could it be that training AI with author/artist work violates their self?I talked with Darren Hick about all this, who wrote a few books on the topic. I definitely didn’t think he was going to bring up Hegel.

My guest and I have been doing AI governance for businesses for a combined 17+years. We started way before genAI was a big thing. But I’d say I’m more a qualitative guy and he’s more quant. Nick Elprin is the CEO of an AI governance software company, after all. How has AI ethics or AI governance evolved over that time and what does cutting edge governance look like? Perhaps you’re about to find out…

People, especially kids under 18, are forming emotional attachments with AI chatbots. At a minimum, this is…weird. Is it also unethical? Does it harm users? Is it, as my guest Robert Mahari argues, an affront to human dignity? Have a listen and find out.

You might want more online content moderation so insane conspiracy theories don’t flourish. Sex slaves in Democrat pizza shops, climate change is a hoax, and so on. But is it irrational to believe these things? Is content moderation - whether in the form of censoring or labelling something as false - the morally right and/or effective strategy? In this discussion Neil Levy and I go back to basics about what it is to be rational and how that helps us answer our questions. Neil’s fascinating answer in a nutshell: they’re not irrational and content moderation isn’t a good strategy. This is, I have to say, great stuff. Enjoy!

From the best of season 1. Part 2 of my conversation with Alex. There’s good reason to think AI doesn’t understand anything. It’s just moving around words according to mathematical rules, predicting the words that come next. But in this episode, philosopher Alex Grzankowski argues that AI may not understand what it’s saying but it does understand language. In this episode we do a deep dive into the nature of human and AI understanding, ending with strategies for how AI researchers could pursue AI that has genuine understanding of the world.