It's great to be here. Thank you all for coming. I'm going to talk a little bit about the place of philosophy and the ethics of that.
Plus, we can contribute to this field. Practical ethics was developed in the 1970s, in the 1940s and 50s.
It was understood that ethics didn't have much to do except analyse moral language,
analyse the meaning of terms like food and riots and obligatory of things like that,
and maybe explore the tooth conditions for which a particular utterance was true or false.
And then in the 1970s, a lot of social movements happened that put pressure on the discipline both externally and internally.
And that made philosophy engage more directly with political issues.
The Vietnam War was an important thing that happened, that the philosopher started to think about feminism,
questions about abortion and sexual orientation and discrimination, and so on.
And this really changes the story first, a lot of students became very,
very much involved in philosophy and sign up to philosophy courses at a time when philosophy was kind of losing steam.
And whenever I read about these moments in philosophy history, I always had a bit of jealousy and thought I just came to philosophy 30 or 40 years.
You know how interesting and how important to change the discipline in a way that can contribute positively to the world.
And one moment that was particularly important wasn't.
In 1972, the New York Times came out with a story about the Tuskegee experiment and the Tuskegee scandal,
and this had been an experiment that carried on for 40 years in which people who have
syphilis were observed and they weren't treated even though treatment was available.
And it was a huge scandal that we pushed have the discipline of medical ethics forward.
And I think in many ways we are in this in a similar situation when in the 1970s,
we have new technologies that are facing us with new problems that we haven't faced before
and that computer scientists are not particularly well trained to think about these things.
And we have new scandals like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, amongst others, that we make tangible the need for for ethics.
So perfect ethics more generally. Tries to come up with ways to apply theory into practise, and so there's a question of, well, OK,
so that's what practical philosophy does more more or less, but how can philosophy contribute to ethics in particular?
What is special about the philosopher and what is special about the philosopher in the context of the ethics of A.I.?
And this is just the latest version of a question that has been bothering philosophers for a long time,
and many people have for getting different answers. So this is just a small sample.
And although there are many controversies within this debates, maybe the most important of which is.
Are there more authorities and what do we mean by mall authorities? There's much more consensus and disagreement within that debate,
and perhaps the most important points of consensus is that philosophy can offer conceptual analysis in the
hope of leading to better decisions and also better justifying decisions that have already been made,
especially to those who lose out, you know, in a decision and with the hope that consumption rises can make debates sharper,
it can get shorter and it can make it less intrusive.
So what is consumption analysis and what kinds of things does it include?
It includes things like clarifying concepts. Sometimes people are fighting about something and they're not even talking about the same thing.
And on occasion,
making sure that people are talking about the same thing even leads to the solving problems is something that with this sign defended.
Of course, that's not always the case, and sometimes philosophy can provide nuance like any other discipline.
Ethics has developed a very technical language that can be much more nuanced than just ordinary moral language.
So it's not only about right and wrong, it's about what's permissible, what's not permissible,
what's obligatory, what might be Suburgatory above and beyond duty and so on.
It's also about working out the implications of use some views might be might feel very attractive or very attractive in a first glance.
And then you start working out what are the implications,
either practical implications or theoretical implications and suddenly it doesn't seem that attractive anymore.
A good example is how your personal data has been treated or some some people think that we should treat personal data as property.
And that sounds quite intuitive, except when you start looking at the implications and how property differs from personal data.
It doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore. Pointing out contradictions.
Public discourse is full of contradictions and fallacies, both in the media but also in parliament and everywhere in between.
And philosophers can point out those distinguishing questions of fact from questions of value.
It's not always obvious and it's not always easy. For instance, in the 1960s, we thought that death was just a biological question,
a medical question, whether somebody was dead or not, just for the doctor to the side.
Suddenly, with mechanical ventilators, we realised, Well, you know, we have these bodies that are warm, their hearts are beating,
but their brains seem to be destroyed and we can harvest their organs and they're alive or they're dead.
And suddenly, the philosopher comes and says, Well, you know, what do you mean by that?
Is it the death of the body, the death of consciousness and death of the person?
The death of the interests and rights that typically attached to people, and finally providing theory and in practical ethics?
Of course, there's a lot of theory that comes both from narrative ethics, metaphysics and so on.
And in the property, in the course of application, many times we realise the limits and possible mistakes of the theory itself such that.
Practical cases and also empirical facts inform the theory and change it in politics.
And this is an interesting process because, you know, philosophy has a bad reputation for a lot of disagreements.
There are a lot of progress and consensus. But in fact, when you study these of the the history of philosophy, theories get very much polished.
First, they're a consensus on some things that they used to.
There was disagreement in the past, but even when there is disagreement with, for example,
consequentials, today is a much more sophisticated theory than it was in its origins.
And partly, theories get polished through bumping up with reality and taking a look at types of cases.
Secondly, it's really important for philosophy to identify moral problems.
And again, some of these are not as obvious as you might think.
So before bioethics came along, doctors engaged in all sorts of problematic practises that once seen as a problem, weren't seen as problematic.
So, for example, is not informing patients on their diagnoses randomising patients to treatment or placebo without informing them that they were
part of a research and or even conducting very invasive examinations like rectal examinations in patients who were unconscious.
And this one seen, as you know, doctors having bad intentions or anything like that is just.
They laugh. Third, philosophy can inspire moral thoughts and.
Through arguments and thought experiments and analogies, we can raise moral thought about prejudice and invite people to consider certain situations.
And in so doing, stimulates their their moral thinking and also challenge moral intuitions.
And here I think there's a very important role for public philosophy and for public engagement with the public in general.
And then finally, philosophy can provide experience. What ethicists have extensive experience tackling difficult issues,
and it would be a waste to not involve so much knowledge in a time when there's so much at stake.
Of course, a person doesn't have to have a pristine ethics or have published in the best ethical journals to have good ethical insights.
But spending most of your hours or most of your days thinking about ethical questions,
trying different methodologies and learning about past these pitfalls does provide some kind of experience that can be of use and in the sense.
Practical ethics has most experience with medical ethics, of course.
And I think there's a lot to learn from this analogy that still hasn't been worked out,
both from the similarities in these two fields and the differences.
I think digital ethics is much more political than medical ethics.
Just cite one difference, and that makes it's going to make it very, very different.
And also, we have a lot to learn from successes, but also from failures.
And one of the biggest failures, in my view of medical ethics is how it hasn't been able to regulate Big Pharma property.
So Big Pharma today gets away with, for instance, carrying out 100 experiments to prove that a drug works.
99 of them show that the drug doesn't work. One shows that the drug might work and that one gets published.
The 1990s don't get published, and sometimes researchers can even talk about it.
This is a huge failure, and it sort of signals a challenge that we have with regulating industry because most are a good part
of the research carried on an A.I. right now is carried out by industry and not in universities,
and so it is a huge challenge for digital ethics to tackle.
So just to finish, I'm involved in the following research projects I'm thinking about what digital exclusion for medical ethics.
I'm finishing a book about the privacy I'm working on the ethics of prediction.
Human beings have been using predictions since the oracle of five, and strangely enough,
we haven't thought much about the ethics of prediction and what makes a prediction ethical.
And most importantly, and the thing that I'm most excited about is editing the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics.
Many philosophers in the room where I in that which is great and it's going to cover all sorts
of things from our sex and friendship in the digital age to democracy in the digital sphere,
the use of killer robots, surveillance, privacy and so much more.
So it's very exciting. This is a very exciting time, and I'm no longer jealous of the practical emphasis of the 1970s.
I think this is so much better. And one day in 10 15 years, when the institute has had enormous impact on the ethics of AI,
each of us will be able to say that we were here the first thing and besides.