Hello, everyone, and welcome to this launch of the Institute for Ethics and I in Oxford.
Thank you for joining us.
This institute is made possible by the historic philanthropic gift from Stephen Schwarzman to create a new centre for the humanities at Oxford.
The centre will bring together seven humanities faculties.
It will create a new state of the art performing arts centre and a new centre for Ethics and I.
The goal is to harness insights from the humanities gleaned from a millennium of scholarship and to apply them to the technologies of the future.
Such as I. To do this,
we will bring together philosophers and other humanists with technical developers and users of A.I. and academia and business and government.
The ethics and governance of the is an exceptionally vibrant area of research at Oxford,
and the institute will build on this work as it explores how A.I. is changing, how we work, how we live, how our democracy functions.
The institute has gotten off to a very strong start by assembling a wonderful group of academics with
more appointments to come and by organising an important series of stimulating events such as this.
This evening to help us explore the questions of A.I. and democratic culture,
we've convened a fabulous panel and I'm delighted to have the chance to introduce them to you.
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is principal of Jesus College and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science.
He's chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute and a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.
Niger has been unfailingly generous with his time,
wisdom and commitment as we've sought to define the institution in such a way as to mobilise work and
related fields across the university while optimising its impact on the world beyond the university.
Professor Alan Landau is associate professor of political science at Yale.
Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory, political epistemology, theories of justice,
the philosophy of social sciences, constitutional processes and theories and workplace democracy.
Allen is the author of the recent book Open Democracy, published by Princeton A Vision for a new,
more open form of democracy based on non electoral forms of representation.
Professor Joshua Cohen is a political philosopher and is on the faculty of Apple University.
He's also a distinguished senior fellow in law, philosophy and political science at Berkeley.
He has written on issues of democratic theory, freedom of expression, religious freedom,
political equality, democracy and digital technology, good jobs and global justice.
His books include on democracy, democracy and Association Philosophy, Politics, Democracy,
Rousseau, a Free Community of Equals, and the Arc of the Moral Universe and other essays.
And finally, I'd like to introduce the chair of today's panel, Professor John Sourceless,
who is the inaugural director of the Institute for Ethics, and I am professor of ethics and Legal Philosophy here in Oxford.
Professor Thewlis, until recently held the chair of Politics, Philosophy and Law in King's College, London.
He has degrees in law and philosophy from the University of Melbourne and a different philosophy from the University of Oxford,
where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, previously taught in Glasgow and here in Oxford,
and has also served as a consultant on human rights for the World Bank. Since coming back to Oxford last year,
he has brought insight and energy to the role of director of the Institute for Ethics and A.I. and we're delighted to welcome him back to Oxford.
Over to you, John. Many thanks for that very kind introduction, Louise.
And before beginning discussion, I want to say a few words about the mission of Oxford's Institute of Ethics for Ethics.
In a good place to begin is the word ethics itself for many people.
Ethics is just one form of regulation, amongst others.
Many perhaps big tech companies, amongst them regarded as a soft form of regulation to be distinguished from law, which is enforceable.
Indeed, on a cynical view, ethics is a matter of facile matters like Don't Be Evil, which can be hard to distinguish from corporate PR.
But that is not at all how we understand ethics.
In the Institute for US, Ethics refers to the ultimate values that human beings should respect and pursuit values like justice,
equality and the common good. And two of the reasons for action generated by those values in particular times and places.
On this expansive view of ethics, it is not one form of regulation, amongst others.
Instead, ethics is the foundation of all forms of regulation, whether political, economic, legal or any other kind.
It is ethical judgement, for example, that determines whether a given kind of activity,
such as the use of self driving cars or online microtargeting is an appropriate subject matter for legal regulation.
And if it is, what form those laws should take.
It is because we understand ethics in this way. It is because we understand ethics in this way,
that the institute gives a central role to the discipline of philosophy and why the
institute enjoys the great privilege of being based in Oxford's faculty of philosophy.
Philosophy is the academic discipline with a centuries long cross-cultural track
record of seeking to address questions of ultimate value through the use of reason.
One of the most distinctive features of the institute here at Oxford is that it aims to bring
the clarity and rigour characteristic of the best philosophy to this nascent field of ethics.
But philosophy by itself is not enough. The ethics of A.I. is inescapably an interdisciplinary endeavour.
Most obviously, it requires dialogue with computer scientists who are at the forefront in the development of technology.
And it has been immensely gratifying that the institute has already established
close ties with brilliant colleagues in Oxford's Department of Computer Science,
many of whom have themselves reflected long and hard about the ethical challenges thrown up by their research.
However, there's another reason why philosophy by itself is not enough,
a truly rich and informative ethics debate has to recognise that it's ethical questions assume
a significantly different shape depending on the domain of human life that is in question.
The use of robots and A.I. to carry out surgery or to make medical diagnoses, for example,
raises very different ethical issues from their use as judges, law enforcers or lethal weapons and warfare.
This is one reason why it is significant that the Institute for Ethics and I will be housed in the Schwartzmann Centre for the Humanities,
drawing on expertise from a range of other humanities disciplines, from classics to music and also wine.
We're establishing close connexions with other parts of the university,
such as the Oxford Internet Institute and the Blowback School of Government, with whom we will soon be advertising joint posts.
One final aspect of the institute's mission I want to stress is public engagement.
This doesn't simply mean that my colleagues and I are interested in producing work that is accessible
to a wider public beyond academia and which can inform policy decisions and enhance democratic debate,
although it does mean that, too. It also means that we hope that the institute will operate as an inclusive forum in which a broader public
in this country and globally can engage in discussion about the challenges and opportunities of I.
In his work and political philosophy, The Politics,
Aristotle wrote that the person who lives in a house often knows more about it than the architect who designed it.
All of us are increasingly living in a society shaped by.
So it is vital that the voices of those who are affected by applications such
as contact tracing and facial recognition are heard not just those who create,
deploy or profit from those applications.
And this is what brings me to the topic of our discussion tonight, philosophers can play an important role in ethics,
but they cannot resolve these conundrums by themselves, not because they are not wise enough,
but because they have no political authority to do so in a democracy.
That authority ultimately rests in the citizenry. And that is why we thought that is a topic for a launch event.
We could not do better than to explore the interplay of democracy.
And democracy is not just one of the demands of activity in which operates.
It is also the overarching system of governance that is ultimately tasked with addressing its challenges and its opportunities.
So it's my pleasure now to invite our three panellists to join me.
And as they do so, let me remind you that there will be a Q&A session towards the very end of the last half hour of this event.
So please do use the chat function in YouTube to ask your questions.
So thank you so much and welcome, everybody. Perhaps we can begin in the sort of characteristically, perhaps the Danto way of philosophers.
And just to clarify the key terms in both democracy or democratic culture and artificial intelligence.
So when a lot of people think about democracy, they think about Majoritarian Decision-Making, especially in the context of elections,
and then they think about formal political institutions like legislatures that enact laws,
courts that adjudicate upon them, administrators that implement them, police that enforce them.
But the notion of a democratic culture goes beyond purely that formal set of institutions.
And I think one of the things that's most impressive about the work that both Alan and Josh
have done is that that emphasised the need for democracy beyond this institutional context.
But I also know that you somewhat disagree about the nature of that broader context.
Perhaps Joshie might begin by explaining in what sense democracy needs to be broader than just the institutional focus.
Yes, thanks. Thanks very much, John. It's really a privilege to be here.
And I want to, if I may, begin by offering to congratulations one to you for your position as director of the institute
and the other to Oxford for having had the good fortune to be able to bring you in.
As the head of this. I really can't think of anyone who's got the combination of intellectual breadth
and ethical sensibilities that better suits him or her or they to play this role.
So congratulations to both of you. Thanks for the opportunity.
You know, I teach courses in Democratic theory, as does Alan.
And often you begin the course in Democratic theory by discussing what are commonly called minimalist theories of democracy and minimalist theories.
Democracy is a matter of competition for power that's resolved through elections and then a peaceful transfer of power subsequent to the elections.
And this is a view that's presented classically by Joseph Schumpeter in his book Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy, Norberto Bobbio and Adam Sawhorse Gear, contemporary proponent of it.
And and then when you're teaching the course, you always say, well, that's fine, but it sets the Democratic bar pretty low after January six.
That doesn't seem like such a bad idea to a peaceful transfer.
Powers are looking better. Really good.
Still, I don't think we should let those hideous events of January 6th changed the basic conception of democracy as something more demanding,
a form of self-government, a form of self-government in which the people understood as free and equal,
have good expansive opportunities for open communication and organisation to form ideas
and opinions that they aim to translate into programmes to turn into laws and policies.
Democracy isn't simply a peacefully regulated contest for power, but also an informal,
open ended, fluid, dispersed public discussion of matters of common concern.
And that discussion, in turn, shapes public opinion and shapes and is shaped by civic activism and ultimately the exercise of formal political power.
I think of it is a form of power based on an ideal of substantively equal communicative.
Freedom and that system requires good and equal chances for people to express views, access,
it's instructive information from reliable sources to hear a wide range of views and to coordinate with other people
to explore interests and ideas with an eye to developing common understandings and advancing common concerns.
And you know, that system of rights and opportunities that substantively equal communicative
freedom depends in turn on a set of norms and dispositions of the participants.
So there needs to be a concern for truth, for getting things right and a conception,
not Thrasymachus conception of conception of politics as an activity in which the concern for truth matters.
Doesn't that go without saying? Well, apparently not.
Moreover, a concern for the common good politics is about competing and conflicting views about how do we address common shared concerns.
And I think also a concern for civility, which I don't understand, is politeness or etiquette,
but is acknowledging that the way you should argue and justify is in ways that respect and acknowledge the equal standing of other people.
That's what I think Rawls meant by the duty of civility.
Now, some of us are old enough to remember when digital technology was supposed to be great for all of this.
When we finally had the technological foundations for a renewed and reinvigorated Hober Mocean public sphere,
lowering the barriers to entry of speaking and listening and engaging.
But, you know, the bloom fell pretty quickly from the digital rose.
Still, I think the right way to think about the Democratic idea and the technological
challenges to the Democratic idea is by ruling the understanding in this more ambitious
conception of democracy is something more than a peaceful contest for power with a
peaceful transition as incredibly important as that peaceful contest in transition is.
This is a much richer notion of democracy.
It involves citizens getting together, as it were, as free and equal citizens to deliberate about the common good,
to make decisions about the common good, and that deliberations are structured by norms like respect for the truth, civility and so forth.
Then you would agree with most of that, I think, wouldn't you?
Yes, I think I share a vision of, you know, democracy is a deliberative democracy where laws are legitimate,
don't need they've been the product of a reasoned exchange of arguments amongst free and equal.
So that's sort of the ideal. But I think that the way I look at democracy in general,
it a as a procedure to solve collective decisions where power is distributed equally discursive and voting power,
but it's also more generally a regime form. And even more broadly, a type of society,
and it's highly plausible that you can have a functional democracy in the narrow
sense of a procedure or a regime unless you have a functional democratic society.
And what do I mean by a democratic society?
I mean, what Chuck Hagel meant when he when he first visited, basically, it's a society characterised by an equality of conditions.
And it's really something that I you fully understand only when you come from a country where this equality of condition is lesser or in existence.
For me, it was a revelation when I when I moved to the US, even as interestingly,
the actual American regime is not that democratic at all, but in fact, in recent years has become expressly plutocracy and oligarchy.
But the equality of conditions is still there. And it's it's I think it's essential to the stability and viability of a democratic regime.
And can I just pick up one point? You published this important book recently, Open Democracy,
which takes issue with the kind of view of democracy that Josh and Habermas and roles have.
So the idea there is that there is a twin track of Democratic deliberation, decision making, the formal track of elected representatives and others,
and then this informal track that sort of sets the agenda but doesn't actually decide the decision making is made in the formal track.
You've argued for, in some sense, a less emphasis on elections and more on citizens making decisions themselves.
Can you just bring up bring out that disagreement a little bit with Josh?
Yeah. So I think it's it's just that I think in the 18th century,
we took the wrong turn by reinventing democracy in an electoral form when I think there were other forms of
democratic representation that could have been available because of different ideological and conceptual apparatus,
including what I call autocratic representation based on random selection,
something closer to the ancient Greek practises and also to some Swiss practise.
At the time, there were not all that democracy, to be honest, but at least somewhat equally amongst the pool of candidates.
And maybe it's not a real problem, I guess, but my, my, my, my divergence made my difference in disagreement.
That way with Josh is that is still wedded to this dichotomous Habermas and vision of a space where you have like the
politicians and the officials who make the decisions and then the space for a citizen which is wild and free flowing,
and where magically, somehow an agenda for the official sphere is supposed to emerge.
And I don't buy that,
that there's this invisible market of one deliberate the invisible hand of a person in the wild can set up that agenda perfectly efficiently,
efficiently. And I also think that distinguishing between a professional class of politicians and ordinary citizens is,
you know, in the end, I think it's it's not a good thing that if you want an authentic democracy,
we need to rotate ordinary citizens in and out of power and specifically in and out of legislative functions,
but also in and out of the technical administrative structure while most of the laws are being made, actually.
And meanwhile, we should also kerb the power of executives and return it to the function of
executing the law and not making it so that that's that's probably the reason.
So open democracies, not direct democracy, not all decisions being made by the whole populace.
It is citizens representing citizens rather than an elite class representing citizens as elected representatives.
Now, what I think would be interesting to come back to this issue a bit later to see
whether a digital technology affects how we should adjudicate these two views.
But, Nigel, I want to move on to you and just ask you the question, what do we mean by artificial intelligence?
And also to ask you perhaps to expand on something that you said in your book, The Digital Age.
You said that quite strikingly, that you're more afraid of what natural stupidity rather than artificial intelligence
might wreak in the next 50 years of gradually more pervasive machines and smartness.
Yes, thank you, John.
It's it's very instructive to remember that the 1957 paper by Turing Computing Machine with Intelligence actually was published in mind in
a philosophical journal which really kicked off 70 years now of intense work around the methods and techniques of artificial intelligence.
Those methods and techniques have expanded extraordinarily when you try and define a little bit like trying to define life.
There are many variations in many variants. The thing to remember,
I think over the 70 years of the expansion of methods and techniques and we now have a huge
toolbox of methods from structural encoding of causal principles to statistical methods,
the latest forms of machine learning, many different types of ways of representing and reasoning about the world,
that the thing that's really powered much of this acceleration has been the extraordinary and exponential increase in raw compute power,
the technology underpinning the algorithms so that we now live in a world that's
completely diffused with ubiquitous or pervasive supercomputer supercomputers,
that we hardly acknowledge winning loads of algorithms to recognise speech faces,
shopping patterns, suspicious regions of medical images, and the list goes on.
What we have here is an extraordinary set of task, achieving programmes, very narrow, specific.
Azis tuned to the specifics of particular tasks. But those are tasks that we've determined are important, worthwhile and profitable.
And I think the application of extraordinary computing power driving A.I. with
access to huge swathes of our data presents us with a host of ethical challenges,
dilemmas of governance and choices about the ends to which that's all put my view in that quote was that I augments us in the best case,
it empowers us and in the worst case, it will oppress and disenfranchise us.
And those choices are ours alone and not likely to be emerging from any self-aware machine any time soon.
So let's leave that to one side. And my point in that quote was that we might choose to put the machines in ascendancy over us,
but that would be a case of natural stupidity rather than artificial intelligence.
And I think we're seeing fantastic progress in the taming of particular problems that have large search spaces
where the nature of the space being searched and what counts as a successful outcome can be very well specified.
And we've just seen recently the fantastic results in protein folding, obstacle avoidance, face recognition, many, many examples.
But I think what we're appreciating and in this conversation would explore more is that all of this can't just be instrumentalist.
A.I.s use will reflect values that we collectively take to be important.
And I think along with this idea of democracy that was in its origination and through its philosophical history,
a host of ideas around the values that we most prise transparency, accountability,
tolerance, autonomy, dignity, self-determination, reason, evidence, equity.
And I think that's really important. You're seeing a real flourishing at the moment within departments of computer science, within our conferences,
within the the community itself of discussions around value based computing,
human centric A.I. And I think we all now share this deeper concern actually is back to Bobbio.
Very powerful observation that the problem is that it's turning out that representation
doesn't seem to be reflecting the interests and opinions of individuals, but rather organised group interests.
And it's been what we see is that the procedure enables now large organisations
to effect control rather more than individuals and democratic self-government.
And I think that's where a source of a lot of people's unease arises.
So I've got a very straightforward and I think much more instrumentalise view of what I is able to do at the moment.
Great. So let me pick up on that point a little bit.
So you're not seeing the action being in the development of artificial general intelligence, replicating human capacities across the board?
It is about more narrow applications and the emphasis is on human choice about which values these more narrow applications will serve.
So that's very much an image of a science, the technology for which we're responsible.
I just want to ask a question to all of you and just with a brief answer, because the question is, is is rather imponderable.
Is democracy a technology? Is democracy simply a mechanism for bringing up good results, like good decisions?
Or is there inherent value in the democratic process?
Or if both, where is where is its value mostly lie in the inherent value of everyone having an equal say as free and equal citizens,
or in the fact that through this process we get better decisions than we would through other processes.
Just a short answer from all of you then. Do you want to start? Yes.
So I think I'll just answer with an anecdote by Robert Doll at the beginning of.
Democracy, where you reports on the story of Danish Vikings driving up a river in France and from Normandy,
some sticks to me on many levels and they were asked by a messenger coming out from the riverbanks, what's the name of your master?
None. They replied, We are all equals. There's something intrinsically valuable about that.
So they're.
But you also think in terms of making better decisions that way as well, but I often get criticised for overemphasising the dimensions, so I thought.
So you think that I care about the. So you've stressed the diversity, epistemic diversity conducive to better outcomes.
Josh. Well, I think your muted mutagen.
I am, but no longer. First on the issue of intrinsic value.
Yes, and Ellen put it the powerfully on, it's a form of decision making amongst people conceived as equals with,
as Rawls described, at certain moral powers. The in his last speech, Martin Luther in Memphis, Martin Luther King said, you know,
the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right, not the right to grab, but the right to protest for right.
So an exercise of that fundamental moral power. So I completely agree with you on the issue of at the same time,
democracy is a form of political decision making and political decision making is a kind of collective problem solving.
I, I know very little compelling, conclusive evidence that democracy there's some,
but that democracy is consistently better at making collective decisions and alternatives.
But it doesn't have to be better. It just has to be pretty good because there's a there's a limited willingness to pay
the cost of a system that has intrinsic attractions but sucks in other respects.
So but and there's no evidence that it is in way over the line.
Well, good enough to make it worth having democracy for both of those reasons,
but not as the system which somehow optimises on problem solving capacity to do it doesn't it doesn't need to do that.
Nigel, I think we'll come back to that notion of sometimes setting up an expectation
that I somehow has a more perfect solution it can struggle towards and or
arrive at the point about this is there'll be there'll be fallibility all the
way through these systems and they'll be educators we can't take account of.
I mean, the way in which I can be at the service of the democratic process is around equity, availability of resource and insight,
an explanation around facts of the matter where they can be adduced and and large participation of bringing groups together.
But again, we've seen that experiments with the mobilisation at true scale of this falls into some really
rather well understood problems now about giving people genuinely heterogeneous experience.
OK, let's move on to some of the issues around the deployment of baby applications in decision making.
I mean, there's the obvious allure in having an algorithm resolve important decisions.
I mean, it's a mechanical judgement, free procedure.
So you're not at the whim of someone's discretion or judgement, but promises to be faster, cheaper, perhaps more accurate, less biased than humans.
I mean, there were these harrowing studies of judges engaged in sentencing and their
sentences seem to be influenced by the time of day or whether they had lunch.
And also just eliminating what Cass Sunstein calls noise, unwanted inconsistencies between various decision makers.
So there is this tremendous promise to get.
On the other hand, there's the worry that decision making is somehow through algorithms is somehow incompatible with democratic equality, for example.
So there's been a lot of studies that talk about, for example, the ways in which algorithmic decision making to say facial recognition or in having
to do with criminal justice amplifies and exacerbates existing inequalities,
for example, not being able to recognise people with darker skin tones or discriminate against people from poorer neighbourhoods and so forth.
Nigel, is this endemic to algorithmic decision making or can these discriminatory unfair effects be mitigated?
Well, when we design and anticipate these systems, when we think about the goals that we're going to put them to work on,
then we absolutely must reflect on on this broad range of potential and beddings.
Otherwise, you will end up with the classic pratfalls that we've seen in some of these areas.
Now, you know,
if you were if you were well accustomed to the notion that this would be a classification system within these boundaries for these outcome types,
then that's one thing. But when these things are deployed in very broad, open, textured contexts, you're really heading for trouble.
And this is where I think the the kind of philosophical context,
the one that you these are not entirely deterministic systems in, not in the sense that they run,
but in the sense that was they're deployed and interpreted the open texture of the environment, society in which they are deployed.
And of course, we can point to all sorts of very and we have done in the past in our discussions, very exciting examples of human bias.
The column in the Tversky study is this extraordinary evidence that we're very susceptible to very simple distortions and
effects in our decision making and perhaps our algorithms can help us edges towards better decisions that one thing,
rather than putting the system entirely in charge,
an earlier generation of A.I. systems was seen as a decision support what they did and in some modalities,
explicitly it was critique the human decision making, trying to get them out of a local minima,
some kind of local preference or bias zone they were in.
So I think you can play this to support human decision making.
But when you allow the system to simply be deployed without a broad range of appreciation
of the cases of the task to which is being put to critically reflect on that,
you will end up with the rather poor examples we've seen over time recently,
I think in this area with facial recognition or bots online or whatever that might be.
Anyone else want to come in on that? I was just thinking that, you know,
there are different situations if you take a plane and you don't really care whether you are driven by a robot or a human beings,
if you're handed a sentence for a crime you've committed, you absolutely care about the reasons behind the sentence.
So I think it comes down to the reason this is justifiability, the kind of reason you're owed as human beings and citizens in some contexts.
So I suppose even the use of loss that I'm very much in favour of, in fact,
was toned down or avoided by 18th century philosophers because they had no rhyme or reason.
It was not easy to justify. And so they preferred elections because it's based on choice and consent and full rationality.
And I do understand the worry about non self-liquidating or non self-explanatory AI,
where you're just given results with no understanding of how you got to those results.
So this is an interesting point that it's not simply that we're interested in a certain kind of decision being within a frame of accuracy or fairness.
It's also the reasons for the decision. I think this ties in with Joshes notion of the duty of stability, which is not simply about politeness,
but about giving our fellow citizens the appropriate sorts of reasons, the decisions that affect them, especially for officials.
Now, there is a kind of major issue here around the explained ability of AI.
So I just want to quote something from a scientist, Dudayev Tul, on the deep learning style of machine learning.
He says, I find many users who say that it works well and we don't know why.
Once you unleash it on large data, deep learning has its own dynamics.
It does its own repair and its own optimisation. And it gives you the right results most of the time.
But when it doesn't, you don't have a clue about what went wrong and what should be fixed.
In particular, you do not know if the fault is in the programme, in the method or because things have changed in the environment.
We should be aiming, he says, a different kinds of transparency. So you don't know why things went wrong.
But presumably that must also apply to the case where things go right? So there's a kind of divorce between outcome and process.
What do you say to someone who says, look.
I just want to have the right decision that really care about the nature of the process, this is a kind of abstract intellectual concern.
Just, you know, so a few things on that.
I want to go back to the previous point about algorithms and just and I think in the similar spirit to what was said,
just one thing to bear in mind is a tour down historical lane.
I mean, the development of a theory of algorithms in the 1930s is one of the most extraordinary intellectual achievements of the 20th century.
And there's an important point about it that I just want to emphasise, which is, I mean,
basically what happened was Hilbert has a programme in the foundations of mathematics.
He's concerned about completeness, consistency and decide ability.
Girdle takes care of the first two problems. There's things, incompleteness, theorems, the problem of decide ability is left.
And in 36, 37, church interring solve the incidence problem.
Another negative result, and this is one of these cases where you have a you couldn't solve the decision
problem until you had a precise characterisation of what an algorithm is.
And that's what Turing proposes, is I mean, church had a different one, but Turing's becomes the dominant one, computable by a Turing machine.
And now you could prove you could conclusively resolved the decision.
Problem, a pure problem in the most abstract, rarified areas of philosophy and the foundations of mathematics, that's the basis of computer science.
I mean, it's an extraordinary case of following out a kind of intellectually pure problem and doing something that has,
you know, obviously incredibly profound consequences.
Now, one of the troubles is that I think people don't don't have a kind of grip on what an algorithm is.
And so what you get are statements about how, you know, in allocation decisions of the kind that you describe,
the algorithm did it OK, this is like literally nonsense, literally nonsense.
In the following way, there are accountable infinity of algorithms.
So if you don't like the one that you're using, there are plenty more where that one came from and it's a kind of fetishism
attributing a magical property to the algorithm that you're blaming the algorithm.
It's your fault. Look in the mirror. Don't look at the algorithm.
I mean, I'm here very much agreeing with what Nigel has been saying about having a kind of clarity about what the values are that you're pursuing,
what the sense of purpose is and how things can go. That's all on you.
It's on your data. It's also on your model. It's not just a data driven model.
So this kind of blaming algorithms, I think, is letting the letting people off the hook in in a way that they shouldn't be let off the hook.
Now, the particular issue that you raised about explained ability that you day a pearl raises about people,
that's really specifically an issue about deep learning. I mean, it's just a characteristic of it.
It's not an A.I. issue generically. It's a deep learning issue because of the way that deep learning models work.
And it's easy to overexaggerate the uninterpretable ability of deep learning mahsa lots of people who are spending lots
of time trying to figure out how you can make sense of what's happening at a node in a in a neural in a neural net.
But I think. The reason that.
There's a demand for explained ability appropriately is not because there's
an intellectual curiosity about what's happening in the guts of the system,
that intellectual curiosity can't be answered any more than you can.
Answer the question of why, you know, the photon went through one hole rather than the other hole.
That's the way I don't think that can be answered.
The reason that people are concerned about that is because systems are not, as Nigel said, these systems are not perfect and reliable.
And you want to know about the you may want to know why it succeeds when it succeeds,
but you want to know that partly because you know it's going to fail.
It's going to say that your dog is a dishtowel and you want to know how the [INAUDIBLE] did it come up, you know, with a classification like that.
And so I think if I were 25 years old and starting out in philosophy and looking for a really fantastic problem to explore,
I would start writing about explained ability because it's an incredibly rich, complicated,
philosophically, technically complicated area with huge practical importance.
And I think there were about 18 different concerns that are being wrapped together in under the label of explain ability.
And there's enormous benefit that could come from somebody doing some untangling around those.
That is a fantastic recommendation that hopefully some of our listeners will take up.
Let me move to another issue. So we've talked a little bit about issues about fairness and discrimination with respect,
algorithms that address, albeit briefly, this issue of explain ability.
But of course, another worry that people have about the operation of algorithms is that many of them are fed on big data.
And there are issues about the data and in particular issues around privacy.
And of course, a lot of this is the focus, the criticism of what's known as surveillance,
capitalism and the use of big data in order to push people consumer goods.
But you might think that there is a more serious issue when there's a prospect to advance public health to the use of big data.
So the question I'd like perhaps to address briefly here is whether I in areas like advancing public health, for example,
contact tracing and dealing with the pandemic forces us to reconfigure how we think of the balance between individual rights,
like privacy and issues like the furtherance of public goods, like controlling pandemics and eliminating them.
And I just want to quote something that you mentioned, Nigel, in your book.
You say. The single thing that every citizen and every corporate decision maker needs to understand is that the enormous data stores that government,
government agencies, corporations,
trusts and individuals hold are as much a key part of national and international infrastructure as the road network.
So this idea that these massive stores of data are, in a sense, public goods that we can debate about, exclude ability and so forth,
that they're public goods in the sense that they stand to benefit everyone and
it's benefiting one person is not at the expense of benefiting anyone else.
But you claim that we need to open up these sources of data in a way, however, that respects privacy.
How do we how do we strike that balance, that the data can be both open yet at the same time respecting privacy?
Well, I mean, this isn't a single dimension of variation on this,
we often talk about data as being on a spectrum from open to closed in private, but in fact, the conditions under which you vary that.
I mean, I think what we appeal for in the open data movement is that a broader foundation of
possible of data is made available on the open and publicly open licence conditions.
And much of that is not about personal data.
It's everything from when the trains run to where the roads actually join one another or the legal addresses in a country, you know,
you can argue about what you like as your as your as your non personal public data infrastructure, the stuff that relates to individuals.
Now we're seeing an interesting change in perceptions at the moment of a public health crisis.
There is a sense of a collective good. I mean,
there are already laws and regulations which allow various intrusions into your liberties and your your kind
of rights of movement in the case of certain infectious diseases where we're living under them right now.
The issue about how your data is used now,
I think we often get to heads up with this because we think it's bound to be about dereference identifiable data.
But we've got lots of examples now where the data can remain in highly secure enclaves behind all sorts of levels.
Security are my models that seek to understand the transmission of the virus at this moment or where the susceptible groups are in the demographic.
Why models can interrogate that data and the data never has to leave a particular set of secure data centres, for example.
And where and we know that because our patient records are held in that way
and they're currently linked behind various forms of of of secure firewall.
So the question is, the danger comes when that data is just kind of shifted around the place with very little attention and thought to the security.
There's a different aspect to this which says, well, maybe that data will be better held close to the individuals whose data it is.
And so you use different sorts of rights and interests over that data.
And then the decision is where and how you can aggregate and collect that data together.
So we're seeing a very interesting discussion at the moment,
not just around the technology for securing and making data available as and when different groups and interests need it.
But around the need for new kinds of data institution,
new kinds of possibly co-operatives and mutuals where the data is stewarded for public or other collective interests.
So I think that there's not a there's not a single answer to this.
It might appear like that when you look at the kind of throw around contact tracing,
but even then, there are good designs and much worse designs about how you do that effectively.
Presumably, you're not saying that all this goes through some detail of consent by particular individuals with respect to their data?
It can't. In all cases, you've got to kind of understand where the urgency of some of the use to which you want to understand that.
I mean, again, patient records are good examples. There's a general sense that, you know, that within a trusted health care delivery system,
there are limits and purposes to which that data can and should or might be caught.
And I think that we're becoming more sophisticated about our understandings around how you permit and vary that level of of linkage.
But there has to be very careful characterisation of the rules and governance that sits over the top of that.
So we don't see mass exfiltration, for example,
of important information and insights to two organisations that may or may not have a general broader public interest.
Josh, I know you want to come in on this. Yeah, just you know, I agree very much with what Nigel is saying.
I mean, there's real. I mean, there's interesting philosophical work on privacy, but the technologies of privacy protection are important,
sophisticated, secure enclaves, differential privacy to a whole bunch of things.
I want to come, though, to the issue about contact tracing, which this was a big topic around the tensions that you were describing,
potential tensions between protecting privacy and solving a big public health problem.
And I think the issue there are some very instructive issues here.
And I'll start with the terminological point, but I think it has very large, substantive implications.
There is no such thing as digital contact tracing.
There's digital exposure notification.
Contact tracing is different from exposure notification, exposure notification is you got a piece of information.
The information is that you are within a certain relevant distance,
10 or 15 feet for a certain relevant period of time, 15 minutes to somebody who received a positive test for covid.
Now, I've taken several contact tracing courses. I have certification from Johns Hopkins and from the WHL as I never did any because
the programmes were so badly organised that my volunteering didn't get me anywhere.
Or maybe they were well enough organised that they didn't want me and they knew that.
But anyway, I got I took the courses.
And what you learn in a contact tracing course is the contact tracing is basically a human public health activity.
Step one is letting somebody know about an exposure it.
But contact tracing is what you do after that. It's telling somebody how they can be tested, telling somebody how they can inform their employer,
helping them to get some support while they're in isolation.
It's not it's not exposure notification.
Not simply exposure notifications,
and I think the fact that so much intellectual energy went into the arguments about privacy protection in contact tracing,
is it revealing of a kind of if I can use this,
you know, piece of [INAUDIBLE] terminology over indexing, I mean,
over indexing on the significance of information as opposed to a human public health process.
Now. That said, it's also true, so far as I know that, you know, you look in the United States now, case rates are down and mortality is down.
It's a very good. Things have improved a bunch. And there's a discussion about why there is literally no one, as far as I've read,
literally no one who thinks that the rates are down because of successful exposure notification.
Perhaps a lot of people spent a lot of time developing very privacy, protecting exposure notification apps.
I was involved in one of those projects. It's great.
But there if you look at the literature on success stories and less successful stories about dealing with covid Cross nationally,
it is really not a story about some places that had fantastic exposure notification apps.
The most popular exposure notification app is this Indian app.
I've mispronounce it Oroya Saturnus, millions and millions and millions.
But I don't think anybody thinks it's really done very much good.
So there's, I think the public discussion around.
Contact tracing apps, actually, exposure notification apps and protecting people's privacy and dealing with the public health issue and how to
navigate these troubled waters is an expression of a kind of distortion in public discussion of the kind that I know.
As you know, this is the kind of thing that you think about dealing with covid from the contact tracing point of view is a human public health.
Stand up, large numbers of people didn't really happen anywhere to deal with these human needs.
It's not about providing somebody with a piece of information that they don't know what to do with and probably won't do anything with.
Helen, do you want to come into this and just said, I was thinking about this connexion between,
again, democracy and its privacy rights and property rights of our own deadline?
The problem is that with the current sort of structure of our so-called democratic government, a lot of these decisions,
these trade-offs that you think is societies are entitled to make between more privacy or more collective safety.
They are actually made by. Groups of people that are not entirely representative of the larger interests of the population,
sometimes they are delegated to a technocratic sort of structure or agency or
administrative groups that that that that make decisions on on behalf of the rest of us.
And so my own take is that I would like to see something like a citizen's convention on I gotta digital technology to talk about these issues from it,
from an authentically. Democratic representative perspective, if you will, and it could happen at the global level, I know that,
for example, people in Australia don't like Australia is organising something like a citizen's assembly.
You randomly selected on genome editing, and I'm sure we could do something similar on questions of artificial intelligence.
That's a really interesting point.
Is this the kind of lazy assumption that writes accounting, majoritarian norms and therefore not the business of majority,
but rather of technocratic experts, judges and others itself is a mistake?
That was a good thing to actually.
You know, when I read your first question and answer your first question, I was thinking, well, actually, our privacy rights democratic to begin with.
I mean, it's the liberal notion. Did the Greeks have privacy rights?
I don't think so. The business of the private citizen with the business of of the city.
So it's actually interesting to see how stretched, to use your terms on the concept of democracy has become.
It encompasses all the things we deem desirable, including liberal rights, including human rights and all these things.
And I just said before that I do think of democracy as a way of life in society, but it doesn't have to be a liberal society necessarily.
It doesn't have to be.
I mean, we could be a little bit more we could be a little bit more parsimonious in the way we think about a democratic society.
OK, so if I could just say yes, I would just say a word about that.
I just in support of thinking of privacy as having a value in a democracy,
which is if you're constantly under threat of having everything about your life exposed,
the idea that that is going to be empowering to you as a vigilant member of the polity feels a little bit like a stretch.
I mean, I understand there are a whole bunch of other foundations for the idea of a right of privacy,
but I think there is a specific case that I'm sure you were.
I, of course, agree. I do think that if you want citizens who are capable of thinking, they have to have the sort of like a freedom,
internal space to develop ideas that are not that everyone who I would second that,
but still, I think that this triggers the thought that we may want to be, again,
a bit more parsimonious about where those concepts are conscious of, say, and defensive.
By the way, exposure tracing.
There is research recently for such a group in Oxford who claim that they've seen a two point three percent decrease in the in income and vice.
So, I mean, it is hard to do that. Absolutely. And it's a theme that is emerging is that democracy requires genuine deliberation.
That's informed by the respect for truth, that offers reasons to our fellow citizens for decision making,
and that is oriented towards the common good. A lot of people now think digital technology is subverting these processes of public reason,
and they think very often that there is a kind of unholy alliance between,
on the one hand,
big tech that is in the business of sucking up as much of people's attention as possible in order then to manipulate them in various ways.
And on the other hand, exclusionary forms of populism that use social media in order to push out their message to get
people more and more sort of caught up with extremist views and in filter bubbles and so forth.
And so there's this kind of very negative take. And I just wanted to read to you a passage in an op ed recently published by The New York Times.
The author is very distinguished scholar Sesana Zubov,
and she talks about the epistemic coup that is surveillance capitalism, an epistemic coup comparable well,
also at a different level, but comparable in some ways with the coup that she thinks took place or was attempted on January 6th in the US capital.
She says the following is an information. Civilisation societies are defined by questions of knowledge.
How was it distributed? The authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority?
Who knows? Who decides? Who knows? Who decides? Who decides?
Who knows? Surveillance capitalist's. Now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern.
This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claimed the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information
and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.
So beyond any issue of algorithms, there is this deeper structural.
Issue that she's talking about, this epistemically being in a sense perpetrated by big tech,
in some sense in cahoots with government, can I get any responses to that claim?
Yes. Just OK, so, you know, Shoshana Zubov has been writing about these issues for a long time.
She's a fantastic sociologist with great insight, surveillance, capitalism.
Very interesting book. I read a statement like that and it reminds me of something that I often see in amongst people who have,
you know, deep association with technology companies, which is there's a kind of weird, so great chest beating.
And then a few years later, we are so horrible.
We're the most horrible. And it's all the most whether it's the the best or the worst.
There's this I think what she says in that statement is incredibly exaggerated and not about the concern,
the kind of antitrust concern about dominance over communication infrastructure.
No, but the control of what people.
So let me just say a few things about American politics, which she's writing about despite its parlous state.
First of all, it's true that Donald Trump got 74 million votes.
It's also true that Joe Biden got six million more than that, the most votes anybody has ever gotten running for president.
It's also true that there are a bunch of states that were central to Biden's victory,
including Georgia and Wisconsin, where there was a huge long play in state politics over a very long period of time.
That Stacey Abrams in Georgia.
Ben Wikler, amongst others, in in Wisconsin, years of work, years of work, hard work, political work that produced that change.
Thirdly, there is an absolutely decisive break in the Democratic Party from the milk,
the market fundamentalism that dominated the party really since the 1970s.
This is not about Clinton. This is about Carter. Gary Hart, it's goes back a long time to you.
If you look at the debates, about the current debates, about the stimulus's, you see that there's a real willingness to go big,
to do something about climate and a real willingness to go big and to do something about this,
you know, deep, persistent, profound set of issues about racial justice when I lay that parlous state.
Yes, absolutely. But I lay those facts alongside what Shoshana Zubov says.
I just feel like she's. You know, it's a 30000 foot look at something where things look a little different when you get down to 29000 feet even.
Yeah. You're on view, John. I'm sorry, can I get reactions from the audience?
So I don't know, I always feel like this is really new and provocative,
but an epistemic coup, I all I'm thinking of is the actual political failure behind it.
I remember Zuckerberg testifying in front of Congress and what what a what a catastrophe that was,
how incompetent, ignorant those senators in particular, where, I mean, a disgrace.
So, yeah, then surprise, surprise. You know, then these companies take over and do what they want.
And we we're left in our filter bubbles and echo chambers.
And no one is really any way to figure out whether truth life, I think, is the basic political problem,
lack of real lack of regulations and over representation of corporations in Congress.
The American Congress, 84 percent belong to the ten wealthiest percent of the population.
Hello. The working class completely ignored. Then you wonder why you know the rise in torture.
So so you know, and we know for a fact that so basically the overrepresentation of economic interests is the problem,
not the epistemically by some companies. That's that's pointing the finger in the wrong way.
This is a really good point.
And I think in your book, you mention empirical research that says that if you control for the political views of the 10 percent wealthiest in the US,
then there is no real impact of Democratic decision.
Majorities are not causally efficient once you control for the economic preferences of the richest people.
I think this is my way.
And I kind of agree with Josh that ACORN and Bartel's in a very famous 2014 article called Testing its Theories of Democracy Now.
I mean, of course, but it sounds awfully plausible to me.
I just sort of wonder whether this sort of very vehement attack on big tech actually
shrouds bigger problems about capitalism and its relationship with democracy.
So let me just put that out there.
I mean, John Rawls, your teacher and mentor, Josh, famously thought that his theory of justice was incompatible with capitalism,
that you had to have a property owning democracy or that you had to have some sort of socialist system that respected liberal rights.
Is someone like Zubov actually papering over the deeper issue, because, you know, if you think about even on epistemic basis,
prior to the advent of social media having sort of great impact,
how did the mainstream media deal with the Iraq war pretty much lined up in favour of it.
How did it deal with the Vietnam War? So it's not as if there's this great history of successes.
Well, you know, I'm mindful of the fact that, you know, I'm 69 years old, and if I say I've heard this music before, this is nothing new.
It's like the geezers, you know, talking. That's what you do. You say, oh, nothing new here, but I don't know.
There there we are. I mean, I think it's all of the you know, consider just the case of political fragmentation.
More or less than this is not a nice example, but I understand, but more or less than in Germany, 1928.
Fragmentation of the media in Germany, 1928, same deal.
Now, that's as I say, it's not a very good but it had zero like obviously zero to do with digital digital technology.
If you look at the outsized growth in inequality, whether wealth inequality or income inequality.
Not so clear that it's got I mean, there may be something to do with the success of tech firms,
but that's not the I don't think on anybody's story, that's the biggest driver.
And I think outsized growth of inequality has something to do with the nature of our politics.
You look at the failures to go back to the previous point about, you know, the break from market fundamentalism.
You look at the failure, politically consequential failures around trade policy.
I had nothing to do with digital technology and all of this is consistent with saying
that the there are real serious antitrust issues about the dominance of some players.
And and there's there's a lot of action on that.
What it took to get the action in the United States was for people to reject the Chicago
school antitrust view that antitrust is all about consumer welfare as registered in price,
even if you go to consumer welfare is registered and product quality, not price.
Odina Srinivasan has written fantastically on how Facebook competed on product quality.
In particular, Facebook competed against MySpace on privacy protections.
And I think MySpace was gone, so the I mean, this is the idea of attributing all of this stuff to the latest piece of technology.
I think it's it's a little much.
I want to let Nigel come in before we go to questions from the audience, just because I think I think that's pretty much what just to say.
But I would just say that one thing that is available to us,
I think in an age of huge amounts of data traffic, is to apply the same technology that we're using now,
technology, much of it, to shape the traffic, to allow these video conferences to happen, to help us see where the information is flowing.
Now, that may sound like the reason that matters is we have very little visibility,
either as individual citizens or as regulators about what the market concentrations are actually like.
And this isn't just around the commercial context.
It could just as well do with the facts of where concentration of data is at everything from safety data to scientific data.
There is a real need to get much more transparency about the actual flows of data to the destinations.
And actually, unfortunately, what we have is an arms race where everybody is trying to obscure and variously protect that information.
I think if open data, which I see as a jewel to much of the prospect of algorithmic algorithmic decision making, is to offer a hope.
It's to say certain classes of information we could recognise as being a good one is things like beneficial
ownership on issues like where the data flows actually are in this so-called surveillance of his populace,
then we can address some of these alleged concerns.
Are they real or they imagined all that actually concentrations that are invidious to the conditions, the democratic conditions we want to foster.
OK, I'm going to move now to some questions from the audience. So the first one is from Nicholas Hincker.
And he says there's so much progress on recommending systems, learning so much about individuals from data.
Are there ways for this to help democracy and not harm democracy?
So what about the positive side? So then you think that perhaps these developments can actually help have a more radical form of democracy?
I tried to imagine what it could do to a completely reinvented form of democracy where a lot
of it takes place online and you'd be registered on it on a platform called Citizen Book,
you know, like a sort of democratised non-profit version of Facebook.
And and you'd have artificial intelligence at your fingertips to help you synthesise knowledge about, I don't know,
various candidates at the global level or the European level or similar large scale political level to help you sift through various profiles
and then choose the right candidate for an electoral mood for some issues or and sort of question when there's a sort of electronic referendum.
So I could see these these technologies as augmenting and speeding up the process of making collective decisions.
So that's one way in which I was trying to imagine that these tools could be useful.
You could envision I know Jim Fishkin, I'd send for his artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence facilitator for Notkin deliberation,
so that that also cheapens the cost of large scale democratic innovations like deliberative polls, like citizens assembly.
So in the end, you know, I already had a chance to argue that point before.
But I do think that we the danger, the generosity of our A.I. depends in part on the quality of our democracy.
If we are in control, if we know how to run, instrumentalise technology to good ends, then then we'll be fine.
But our democracies are in terrible shape. In fact, they are hardly democracy at all.
And so and just to go back to the point about democracy is a way of life.
And, you know,
I also think the question of the workplace is really important in the sense that I wish we could all say we have new masters like those Vikings,
you know, but if you if you're in a corporation and your health care depends on your boss and, you know, and in this pandemic,
you could lose your job and you get depressed and, you know, you have a master and can you be free?
Can you. So all these things are connected to my life.
Another question from Lloyd Rushton regarding personal data,
should we impose fiduciary duties on those who seek to utilise such data in addition to empowering data subjects through collective initiatives?
Nigel.
I think that's certainly something where that exists in certain cases of sensitive data, you're not simply free to do what you want with this stuff.
I think I think evolving a regulatory landscape and a legal landscape where there are duties of care over how data is actually
deployed is something that we will see emerge as we start to understand the scope and range of it will become very acutely aware.
And you see this particularly, for example, in areas where age appropriate design.
So if you want to look at some of the most harrowing examples,
then you look into examples of where a persuasive design is used with respect to interacting with children on children's apps.
So I think there is every prospect of needing to think about a balance of interests that place fiduciary actual constraints on use of data.
If I may say, I do think also, though, and I don't think we're in disagreement here, fiduciary responsibilities are fine.
But you have you've got a bunch of data that's a threat surface that somebody is going to go after.
And so you I think it's very important to think on the technology side of privacy protection.
So and there are a whole bunch of tools. There's differential privacy.
You do own device processing. You have a principle of data minimisation so that you only collect the data that are needed.
You have some sunset law that requires that the data go.
You have secure enclave's because you know, what you're what you want is both to have the data protected against threats,
but also, frankly, to protected to be protected against your own temptations to do the wrong thing.
But if you want to protect it against yourself, so fiduciary obligations.
But I think discharging those in a way that gives a kind of technolog,
a set of that wraps the protections in a pretty secure technology is an important strategy.
We've talked about some of the power structures and power imbalances that into the operation of democracy.
But Carrisi and asks a question which I'm going to summarise now, that is, how can we reach a consensus,
a democratic consensus about fairness with respect to the operation of algorithms when we know that
people's conception of fairness is so heavily shaped by cultural norms and they differ so greatly.
So there's so much cultural fragmentation within our democracies, who gets whose conception of fairness gets to win out?
Who overrides whom? She asks. So I think that that's a wrong way to ask the question.
It's not about who overrides to it's it's to convince who.
And again, I am just going to bring it back to my favourite thing, which is the Citizens Conventions.
One took place in France recently on climate change, very controversial issue.
You had renters against landlords about mandatory housing renovations, you know, to limit greenhouse emissions.
And so if you look at it as a as a as a negative sum game where some people are going to lose, some people are going to win,
and some people's views of fairness are going to override other people's views of fairness if it's not never going to work.
But if you look at it as a as an orientation toward the common good, we all reason as citizens to go into enterprise.
We are trying to achieve a common goal. In that case was kerbing greenhouse emissions by 40 percent of 1990 levels in a state of social justice.
It actually works. If you institutionalised property, you give it time, you facility well and you structure it well.
It's a success story from my perspective, in terms of what they managed to produce as consensual solutions to very,
very thorny value disagreements and practical disagreements.
They would sit at the end during the seven session about those proposals,
some of them likely to be very difficult to pass through the regular legislative system.
And they voted with like high percentage of of approval, like eighty five percent they convinced each other.
So I believe in that. That's the whole idea of deliberative democracy.
John, if I could add a point on that, I agree with what Alan is saying,
but I also want to pick up on another way that the question is put, which makes me a little uncomfortable.
I mean, it's a great question.
And I can tell you, it comes up all the time and you won't be surprised to hear that if you start by asking what's your conception of fairness?
And you go around the room, you know, honestly, I don't care if it's collective deliberation or individual reflection.
It's going to be all over the place. If you say here's a more concrete problem, is this fair?
Let me give an example.
There was a story in the Times a year ago about speech recognition systems, all the speech recognition systems have have higher word error.
Existing speech recognition systems have a higher word error rate on African-American vernacular English.
I don't know anybody maybe I don't know enough people, but I don't know anybody who thinks, oh, that's that's fine, there's no fairness issue there.
And if you say, well, you know,
if you use African-American vernacular English or you have to do is code switch and don't speak in African-American vernacular English,
it'll be understood fine. No one thinks that that's a fair solution to the problem.
So if you take concrete's rather than abstractions about what's your theoretical definition of fairness,
I think you find a little considerably less of the kind of unending disputation.
I don't mean it goes away because there are hard cases,
but a considerably less of it than you find if you start with high level abstractions about what fairness is.
That's resolving ethical disagreements doesn't mean having to penetrate down to philosophical foundations of those.
No, that's right. And what you what I find is and I think this is very important and it goes back to something
that you said at the beginning about the importance of philosophy in this enterprise.
I agree with you. Philosophy is important in the enterprise,
but it would be hopeless for philosophers to participate in the enterprise were it not for the fact that most people are morally intact.
Philosophers don't teach people morality.
They help to clarify moral thinking. They help to make it more salient.
But if you weren't in a universe of people who,
you know on the whole and for the most part had a kind of facility with moral distinctions and ideas, it would be the enterprise would be hopeless.
That's just to amplify that. The fact is that this area has become practical by the operationalisation of of of context.
So we're both into contact with really interesting classes of moral questions in particular cases.
And I think that is why the discussion between computer science,
application builders and and and ethical philosophical is just such a rich conversation
because you can actually ground in just the way just as difficult questions,
in particular implemented realities. And this has a powerful pedagogic aspect.
So one of my colleagues, Michael Phillips Brown, teaches ethics to engineers, but not by saying, well, his concern is Aristotle in his mill,
not go ahead and apply that to your problems, but by working within the issues that arise in their research is kind of bespoke kind of ethics.
And therefore, even if you have deep of theoretical disagreements, that doesn't prevent being able to resolve those more concrete problems.
As Josh said, you know, I'm going to ask two questions.
I think it's likely the last I'm going to run them together. So one is a question from Jose Marti, who's asking?
Is there any specific contribution that I might make, in particular to strengthen the quality and extension of Democratic deliberation?
So that's about improving Democratic deliberation by us.
But there's another question from my colleague, Ted Lieutenant, who says,
suppose artificial general intelligence can someday generate legislation that is
maximally just political equality is preserved because no one has any influence at all.
Does this reveal democracy's value? I mean, I guess the point would be at that point, Democratic Decision-Making would become redundant.
So enhancement redundancy, pick up either of those and hensman,
I feel like I gave some examples of what I had in mind, but I just had another thought,
actually, which is about mass deliberation, because the big puzzle for me is whether we can have quality deliberation,
the kind that would be legitimising of laws and policies at the large scale,
or whether we always have to go through a representative moment where we did the task of the aversion to a subset with a random or to.
And from what I understand, maybe artificial intelligence could again, because it helps speed up and clarify.
Issues, maybe, I'm not entirely sure,
but I could envisage a role there for artificial intelligence in connecting a humongous amount
of people and to get to that ideal of like all the brains connected together via technology.
I'm not sure it's remotely possible, but that's actually at least an idea I have.
And then what was the second question? How do we know what would happen if we had a perfectly just taking over it was God, right?
I mean, that's pretty much who that would be.
I guess it depends on how much we care about having reasons for what we do and and whether we want to have a master or not.
Because if it's gone to the OR in some respects and I go back to the Vikings, I think we don't want to live with the master.
I think there's a value in that that trumps even getting the right outcomes.
Is it always the case that there are people who could make better decisions than us, like, for example,
someone could make far better sartorial decisions on my behalf, but I don't surrender is something.
I mean, I'm not saying that I'd want to only I think there's a threshold of mistakes that that can go below.
But I think there's a value in learning from your own mistakes and not getting to the right.
And so but sort of deploying yourself as a human being in life through your own agenda.
I guess. Josh, maybe what would happen and no one could make better sartorial decisions for me than me.
I'll just I'll put a stake in the ground there. And if they tried to, I would make their life miserable.
Well, let's see. Nigel's taking his tie off.
So he's coming back to you in one respect, you know, with with respect to the you know, the redundancy alliance as well.
Wouldn't that be like God? And I guess what I would hope is that it would be a Assab abscond dittos.
Yes, I did have the good grace to let us get on with a good grace to let us make continue
to make a mess and sometimes a blessing out of our crookedly timbered lives.
I do wonder whether one of the you know, there have been various attempts at liquid democracy,
liquid democracy meets the block, all sorts of ideas about how you might change the democratic process or the or that.
One of the things that's been striking about recent developments in large scale platforms has been the emergence of citizen science,
a participatory engagement that hasn't been about doing all of the science,
but has been about really important aspects of helping the science succeed, you know,
or tapping into people's enthusiasm to either collect the primary data or to clean data up.
And I think that sometimes we we kind of elevate the decision making to the point where
I think there's lots of ways of participating that these platforms can facilitate.
And we found some fascinating data. In fact, the Zooniverse group here in Oxford, Chris Lento's group,
did some fascinating work where they could actually look at large scale participation and run machine learning across those participations
and find the sub groups within that large participation who were particularly effective for certain sorts of of task or contribution.
And I think there's a lot to be had in reframing this in a slightly broader sense of what it is to participate.
Absolutely. People often forget the Universal Declaration includes the right to participate in science and culture,
and arguably that is a dimension of the sort of broader,
informal public sphere that is relevant, highly relevant to democratic participation on that optimistic note.
Nigel, I think we're going to have to draw to a close. Thank you so much to our three wonderful speakers.
I really enjoyed this invigorating discussion. We've had to touch over lightly some really important themes,
but I think it's been incredibly stimulating and hopefully given our audience a
taste for the sorts of discussions we're hoping to have in future at the institute.
Thank you to the three speakers that really appreciate you taking the time to be part of the launch.
And thank you to everyone for tuning in and listening to us tonight.
Thanks very much. Thank you. All right. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you. Thank you.