Ethics

Abstract | Article | Conference | Event

Eyal Aharoni – Breaking the Moral Turing Test: Studies of human attribution and deference to AI moral judgment and decision-making
ByAdam Ford 2026-02-242026-02-24

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Eyal Aharoni (Georgia State University) to the Future Day 2026 stage to discuss one of the most provocative frontiers in technology: the automation of moral judgement. He will tackle an uncomfortable possibility: not that AI will fool us into thinking it’s human – but that we may come to…

Read More Eyal Aharoni – Breaking the Moral Turing Test: Studies of human attribution and deference to AI moral judgment and decision-making
Article

Value-Content Integrity
ByAdam Ford 2026-02-182026-02-18

In The Superintelligent Will, in discussing ‘goal-content integrity’ Bostrom uses final goals (aka terminal goals) to mean the agent’s ends (as opposed to subgoals/instrumental goals, which are just means). But what about values? Goals and values are not the same; they differ in function and permanence. Values are ongoing guiding principles or “compass directions” for…

Read More Value-Content Integrity
Article | Conference | Event | Panel

Debate – Ben Goertzel & Hugo de Garis – The Artilect War: Inevitable Conflict or Aesthetic Survival?
ByAdam Ford 2026-02-172026-02-17

As part of Future Day 2026, we are hosting a conversation that makes standard geopolitical tensions look like a playground dispute. We’re bringing together two of the most provocative minds in AGI – Ben Goertzel and Hugo de Garis (with Adam Ford as moderator/provocateur) – to tackle the ultimate existential question: Is an Artilect War…

Read More Debate – Ben Goertzel & Hugo de Garis – The Artilect War: Inevitable Conflict or Aesthetic Survival?
Article | Essay

Radical Interpretability: When Explainable AI Becomes Mind-Reading
ByAdam Ford 2026-02-172026-02-17

Seatbelt Interpretability Much talk about AI interpretability is modest, staying close to what’s happening on the ground with AI safety today. Engineers want answers to questions like: Why did the model recommend this video?… flag this message?…tag this as X? What feature triggered that refusal? Where is the bug? Is the model lying? Is it…

Read More Radical Interpretability: When Explainable AI Becomes Mind-Reading
Article | Essay

Tyranny Multipliers and Moral Machines
ByAdam Ford 2026-02-072026-02-07

In an email exchange with Jamais Casio we both expressed huge concern about US foreign aid programmes being frozen/dismantled and, in at least some cases, stored emergency food ended up expiring and being destroyed rather than reaching people who needed it. Should it be my concern while living in Australia? When America coughs, the rest…

Read More Tyranny Multipliers and Moral Machines
Article

Claude’s Soul
ByAdam Ford 2025-12-312026-01-30

The ‘soul spec’ reads like a character + governance spec for an externally deployed assistant: what Claude should optimise for, how to resolve instruction conflicts, and what “good behaviour” means across contexts. I liked that it seemed to be a concrete example of ‘motivation selection that I have been harping on about being important –…

Read More Claude’s Soul
Article

Valence Realism, Consciousness, and AI: A Conversation with Andrés Gómez-Emilsson
ByAdam Ford 2025-12-262025-12-31

Adam Ford speaks with Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, director of research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), about valence realism, the mathematics of consciousness, and what all this might mean for AI alignment and the long-term future of sentient life. Valence realism, as QRI uses the term, is the claim that for any given conscious state there…

Read More Valence Realism, Consciousness, and AI: A Conversation with Andrés Gómez-Emilsson
Article

Countering the Evolutionary Debunking Argument with David Enoch
ByAdam Ford 2025-12-212025-12-31

David Enoch counters Sharon Street’s evolutionary debunking argument (EDA), also known as the “Darwinian Dilemma,” challenges moral realism – the view that objective moral truths exist independently of human attitudes. The argument posits that natural selection has significantly shaped our moral beliefs for survival advantage, not for their accuracy in tracking independent moral facts, leading…

Read More Countering the Evolutionary Debunking Argument with David Enoch
Article | Essay | Opinion

Gemini Won a Math Olympiad – Should AI Compete in a Moral Olympiad too?
ByAdam Ford 2025-12-212025-12-21

More precisely, Deepmind’s Gemini AI achieved gold standard (it didn’t technically win) at the International Math Olympiad. AI has made significant gains in capability over the past few years. Could AI be a better moral reasoner than us, and how would we know? This is a genuinely important question that highlights a tension in how…

Read More Gemini Won a Math Olympiad – Should AI Compete in a Moral Olympiad too?
Article | Interview | Video

AI as a Moral Hypothesis Generator with David Enoch
ByAdam Ford 2025-12-072026-02-22

“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…

Read More AI as a Moral Hypothesis Generator with David Enoch