Join us at the Dyson School of Design Engineering for a series of seminars on Responsible AI, featuring expert speakers who will share their insights on how to develop and deploy AI systems responsibly. The series is chaired by Professor Rafael Calvo.
Talk Abstract
Some people argue that AIs could plausibly have or soon have features such as consciousness, agency and the capacity for social relationships, which could provide a basis for AI welfare. These arguments have massive significance for the societal conversation on AI, raising profound ethical and political questions about what if anything we owe to these new technologies. We provide the philosophical groundwork for a scientific, philosophical and ultimately democratic inquiry into the potential for AI welfare, addressing key questions that cut across different arguments: what welfare is, how to interpret behavioural evidence of AI welfare, what kinds of entities might qualify as candidate AI welfare subjects, the potential grounds for welfare in AI and the practical ethical challenges that arise from our uncertainty.
This is based on the new short book they wrote for the CUP Elements series on AI and Philosophy with Winnie Street.
Speakers Bio
Geoff Keeling is a philosopher working on the ethical and societal impacts of AI including questions around AI alignment, welfare and consciousness. He is a Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, and a Staff Research Scientist at Google. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at Stanford University, where he was affiliated with the Institute for Human-Centred AI and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.
Winnie Street is a Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London and a Senior Research Scientist on the Paradigms of Intelligence team at Google. Her research combines philosophical and empirical approaches to questions of AI cognition, consciousness and moral status, and their implications for AI ethics and safety. She previously worked as a software developer, and researched human-computer interaction problems at the intersection of privacy, trust and ambient computing.