“AI as a moral hypothesis generator” – with David Enoch. AI may be useful to help generate moral hypotheses using pattern recognition to find deep ethical patterns (meta-patterns) invisible to humans or hard to see – proposing new moral ideas or testing existing ones within varieties of ethical frameworks like utilitarianism or deontology, acting as…
Halloween special: a scary futures tier list that is spooky in theme & sobering in content. This tier list isn’t scientific, it isn’t the final say, it doesn’t exhaustively include all doomsday risks – its a bit of a gimmick, and a fun intuition pump. Anders Sandberg is a neuroscientist and futurist well known for…
Stelarc’s art suggests that humanity’s future lies not in holding onto the “natural” body, but in embracing its redesign. The body is contingent – a temporary configuration ripe for reinvention. “The idea of redesigning the body is something that’s come out from the perceived inadequacies in interacting with technology. So for me it’s not an…
The Ethics of AI: Why We Need Moral Machines, Not Just Smart Ones In an era defined by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, we often find ourselves wrestling with profound ethical questions. One of the most provocative of these is whether machines can, or should, be given a sense of morality. In this recent video…
Part 1 in an interview with Eric Sampson on Moral Realism. Note AI is referenced, but the bulk of the questions about AI are covered in part 2. Chapters 0:00 Intro 3:03 Why is moral realism attractive to AI Safety Research? 2:02 Background, & Personal reason to choose moral realism 4:00 Describing moral realism –…
In this short interview, Peter Singer, a renowned philosopher and ethicist widely recognized for his thought-provoking ideas about universal ethics, discusses the value of life, moral progress, population ethics (aka population axiology), the far future, the uncertainties inherent in philosophical reasoning, moral realism (objective normative truths) and ‘alternative facts’. Points covered:0:00 Intro 0:08 Moral progress…
Singular Learning Theory (SLT) is a novel mathematical framework that expands and improves upon traditional Statistical Learning theory using techniques from algebraic geometry, bayesian statistics, and statistical physics. It has great promise for the mathematical foundations of modern machine learning. Executive director at Timaeus – an AI safety research org working on Developmental Interpretability (also…
This interview was conducted in 2012 in San Francisco. In the future may will see it is not ethically responsible to play genetic roulette and instead take the decision to have happy, healthy, pro-social offspring. 0:00 Introduction0:36 Alleviating Suffering 7:00 Justified Suffering? 13:12 Buddhism 14:42 The World Transhumanist Association 22:35 Recalibration of Society or Biology?…
Dr Simon Goldstein is an associate professor at the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at ACU. In 2023, he is a research fellow at the Center for AI Safety. Simon’s research focuses on AI safety, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Before ACU, Simon was an assistant professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Simon received my…
With AI we have made a ‘Faustian bargain’ – are the risks reason enough to halt technological progress? Professor A. C. Grayling discusses the implications of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics on society, and shares his views on how they will reshape the future. The thing that’s going to change everything is machine learning,…