It's my great pleasure to welcome as our first speaker, appropriately so Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, principal of Jesus College,
who's a professorial research fellow in the Department of Computer Science and chairman of the Open Data Institute,
which he co-founded with Tim Berners Lee, amongst many other distinctions.
Nigel is a fellow of the Royal Society. And in 2013 was knighted for services to science and engineering.
He's published over 500 articles on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience and from A.I. to the Semantic Web.
And Nigel has been fronting the universities in Connexions with the Schmall Schwartzman Foundation to bring about this new institute.
So, Nigel, over to you. Thank you. So I just wanted to set the scene really for today's wonderful set of talks,
vignettes around the range and scope of what's going on around the challenges of
ethics in many of the advanced technology settings that we were almost engaged in.
And also to explain where this all came from.
So we know that the Schwartzmann Institute itself, the Schwartzmann centre itself, is a much bigger endeavour involving the humanities in general.
And one thing to be very clear about, when people heard the announcement of 150 million pounds.
Some people mistakenly imagined that was for the Institute for Ethics in.
Now, I know it's a it's a part of that gift.
And it's the part that is particularly exciting because it's there to support human talent,
to support appointments in the area, in the faculty of philosophy in particular.
And I'll talk about those. So it's a significant but a very minority part of that gift.
But it's a significant and the whole challenge of this is, of course,
premised on the fact that we know that computer science and particularly artificial intelligence present huge challenges.
This is one of my favourite quotes. This is from cybernetics. Father Norbert Viña in 1948 already foresaw that, as he called it,
the ultra rapid computing machine was an ideal central nervous system for an apparatus for automatic control 1948.
He foresaw the opportunities for. Unheard of amounts of good and evil.
And boy, was he right there.
And of course, you're the forcing function that we recognise in that much technology accelerates under the impulse of of conflict, sadly.
So whether it's Bletchley Park, where, of course, so much of the early work on automated computing happened, kept much of it classified,
sharing himself, of course, working there or it was the Manhattan Project where can computation was required.
This forcing function accelerate both the demands, the technology, but also very quickly led to issues around the fundamental ethical questions.
The other thing I like to present is the fact that modern A.I. is understood very often to simply be all about machine learning.
And as somebody who has been working the field since the late 70s, I've seen a number of cycles of A.I. come and go.
And in that time, different methodologies have held sway.
Back in the day was rule based systems theory improving a whole range of methods to do search.
And each time round the cycle of enthusiasm, particular human capabilities fell to the dominance of the machines.
There was always a question around the ethical deployment of this, even back in the 80s when people were talking about building expert systems.
What about the experts the systems would displace? Could we trust the actual diagnosis?
The systems would give us worthy accounts, explicable and understandable and so on.
So there is no there is no shift in some of the fundamental challenges facing us over many decades.
But what has happened clearly in recent times is the emergence of a particular class of computing power,
a method that has led to some breakthrough moments. These so-called deep neural networks,
various forms of machine learning have led both to the try the triumph of machines over particular areas of human expertise.
This, of course, is Alpha Go's triumph over Lisa Abdulle and most recently achieving extraordinary results
in what was thought again to be quite difficult to master areas of problem solving.
This is a multi-strategy king called Starcraft. It's it's the latest achievement, again, of the deep mind science research labs.
Of course, within all of that, there's plenty of good things going on. But again, sometimes with issues around the ethics,
this is the Google DMI at work on diagnosing various diseases from the retinal scans that were available,
whether it's various forms of in this case, this is diabetic retinopathy.
These systems are very good at detecting patterns and coming up with all sorts of really rather impressive classifications.
But even there, there was an issue ultimately that fell into the whole area of was the data used
to train these systems acquired with the appropriate level of informed consent.
It is almost impossible to think of an AIM deployment mode in which ethical questions don't abound.
Oxford's own working let net wonderful work to actually get to the level of human expertise in reading.
You can imagine various forms of more intriguing deployment of these kinds of technologies.
In fact, it was the central thesis of 2001. How, if you remember, read the lips of the astronauts in the pod, or indeed facial recognition,
which is already causing concerns about its sensibilities and sensitivities around particular forms of bias.
Given certain sorts of training regime and given a particular deployment notes.
The all more obvious ones, of course, range from what you do with autonomous vehicles to how you should restrict
and control the weaponization of of platforms such as A.I. included in drone.
More extensively, we worry about the use of extensive amounts of data in domains such as predictive
policing or indeed at a national scale when deployed by states such as China.
In that social credit system, we worry about the flows of data from our mobiles, from our devices.
In fact, my group in Oxford has spent a lot of time trying to understand just what that ecosystem looks like.
And it's clear that the flows of data are extensive. They're numerous.
This is just one particular flow of data from one app surrounded by a few of us on a phone that we were able to
track and understand just how extraordinary the economy of data exchange is and where is the control of that.
And whereas the oversight and insight in that often your ethical challenges are cheek by jowl with questions around governance and regulation.
And within all of this, we have concerns about the emergence of dominant platforms both in.
East and west, who seem to have so much control in this emerging world of data enabled A.I. algorithms
and data able to aggregate algorithms that they say aren't just about machine learning,
they can just as much be about expert system reasoning, about various forms of model based reasoning.
There are a very large set of methods now available to the computer scientist and the engineer, the various people looking to exploit the methods,
even if it is in some cases, statistics read, presented various forms of linear regression or whatever.
There will still often be ethical challenges at the end of that deployment issue.
So the question for us isn't just so to think about this in the narrow confines of what we might think
of as a robotic controlled drone or a particular use of a neural network in a biometric system.
It can be how data and Arab rhythms are used very broadly on the Web, how they're used in targeting and surveilling.
So in the broadest sense, this was always the ambition.
And so when I was asked to put together a proposal for the Schwartzmann initiative and this was very much driven out of his own concerns,
Swartz was unconcerned that he was seeing a world emerge where his particular worry was around the concern of how these systems might be deployed.
It was natural to turn to oxfords extraordinary, extraordinary heritage in this area.
It's not hard to make the case for ethics, of course. But Oxford, you have the most extraordinary cast of characters here.
Looking through a history that includes everybody from had to parfit to to to warn Ockham Murdoch.
These are these these are extraordinary figures who have shaped our thinking in the ethical and moral space.
And in some respects, of course, Mary Warnock's work also held an appeal to many because this was a person who
managed to convene an entire regulatory framework and lead on that thinking
and the deployment of a technology which at the time concerned people the whole way in which human fertilisation and embryology science was moving,
reproductive science was moving.
And that multistakeholder conversation, which had serious ethical underpinnings, was one of the reasons that we found the way forward to nuance.
That interesting debate. And one of the things I think we will see as the landscape develops here in Oxford is
this very interesting appeal to lessons learnt from fields such as medical ethics.
Many of the problems addressed have near analogies.
Some will turn out to be different, whether it is the use of human subjects or what is being done to them or the question
of informed consent or how access is granted to two parts of the population.
Many of these will have their equivalents in what we do.
So when we looked at the proposal as we assembled the proposal, we were surrounded really by a surfeit of riches.
This diagram just begins to reflect. This is we call this a heliocentric bottle.
This is not to imply, by the way, that the you are all circling this quite not quite existent existing ethics in a institute.
This is meant to represent the extraordinary level of import and cognate activities that
we can look at from computer science and our involvement in the Alan Turing Institute,
on the one hand, to the work that goes on in the Oxford Internet Institute.
Hear about some of that today and indeed the work and the ahero Centre for Practical
Ethics Work in the Human Future of Humanises Institute work in a governance,
working diplomatic school on policy,
a whole set of interests emerging in law around how we might think about legal restraints and applications in technology in medicine.
Again, the Welcome Centre for Ethics, the Oxford Martin School, Oxford Foundry for Innovation,
the Big Data Institute up in the Medical Science Division and Information and Engineering,
where much of the really interesting robotics development goes on and other things too.
So it's a very rich surround. This won't even be completely comprehensive.
But what's compelling about that is that you set this effort.
Within a nexus of really interesting research, and I think one of the things that Peter's looking to do is to is to is to help convene
the plurality of those conversations around the interests of the ethics in a institute.
Now, that, of course, is as yet to be staffed, to be to be established.
But the interesting, absolute essential difference of this and some people said there are any number of ethics in a I or ethics initiatives,
somebody counter some extraordinary number of ethics, a coach the other day and it was in the low hundreds.
Believe it or not, lots of them are close similarities to one another.
And a lot of it. A lot of it. One suspects that various forms of virtue signalling lots of it.
You might suspect some kind of copying to get into something that seems an idea whose idea of the moment.
I think the difference in the effort here is to locate this whole enterprise in the deep research of
the faculty of philosophy in a tradition where the philosophical questions are primary are paramount.
Now, we can divide those up in any any variety of ways in whatever set of questions you raise here.
There are more whether it's about when you use or don't use the technology, whether it's fair, who's responsible for it, who has access to it.
Does it sufficiently explain itself? Does it varies?
You go from one geography to another to one culture to another?
What about its utilisation for public and private goods?
And all of this just provides a sense of the depth and range of ethical questions that will arise in the last few minutes.
Let just me say something about the shape and structure of where we are.
So this all began with a group of individuals who gave of their time and energy are hugely grateful
to them in a steering committee that was put together back in actually almost a year ago.
It seems extraordinary, just I think I was approached about a year ago and and then indeed,
in January of this year, we began to think about shaping the proposal.
So myself and Chris Timson, head of philosophy, Dan Grimly, Phil Howard from the ally, Mike Wooldridge, computer science.
Aseel Fabbri, a philosopher. Mike Parker and Alison Noble.
Mike Parker from the Welcome Institute. And Allison from Information Engineering.
Actually, Alison, replace Angela McClain,
who was the original originally on the committee as Angela took up the chief scientific adviser role in one of the Ministry of Defence.
So that group had gotten together and tried to frame and shape.
The proposal in a way, that was that was going to work for for the university.
The plan ultimately is that there'll be a management committee of the institute to be confirmed.
And it will be Cross Divisional. Probably will mirror the kinds of things we see within things like the Bullivant Neek School.
The advisory board will comprise internal and external members.
They will be advisory. They will not set the agenda.
It's important to say, and we are at this moment about to advertise for a director for the institute.
My role is essentially to try and steward this into existence.
I think the important thing to say is of all of the activities associated with the guest.
This is one of the first ones to to begin its work because the building,
which will be placed on the Rateliff Observatory site, will be a number of years in development.
I mean, it could be four to five years before that is actually opened. In the meantime, we would like to be undertaking this exciting research agenda.
So a director and initially two associate professors are being will be being advertised,
one of these in philosophy and one in philosophy and computer science.
There are five associate professorships ultimately to be appointed, two.
So this will be a substantial centre of gravity in terms of the ability to research and teach.
And the other thing to say is that these will be at least the first two advertize will be college associations as well.
So we're trying to wrap the Institute Stot into the Collegiate University.
There will be a number of post-doctoral research fellows or jail appointments.
There will be a significant number of Theophile students.
We are looking to use the model of academic secondment to move people into the institute for periods
of time where their research would help and be valuable and a significant vesting fellows programme.
So in total, we might imagine that in four or so years time there would be 20 or so individuals at the core of the of the institute and ultimately,
of course, looking to develop and expand with joint programmes of work to even more significant, more significant size.
The other thing is probably worth mentioning is that there was always the ambition that we would develop.
Various forms of curriculum, content to inform our teaching.
And the interesting model here is to think about the evolution of our various.
Courses where philosophy has been at their heart.
Whether it is the original literary Amarna raise with the Greeks, as it was called, the modern Greeks,
which reflected the fact that economic elites have become a subject that required required study, political science and philosophy.
The scientific Greeks that we saw evolve philosophy, psychology, linguistics in the 20th century,
physics and philosophy, maths and philosophy, computer science, philosophy.
One of the interesting things about these is the extent to which computational thinking,
the intrusion of new ways of understanding our world has been very much at the centre.
So the question will be how we can develop content that is capable of being inserted into even Masters and on the great as undergraduate modules.
That would certainly be an ambition. And I'm certainly aware that in computer science we have a significant need for appropriate ethics courses.
It's not in and of itself the only thing, of course, going on. There is an ongoing cultural programme that will be being launched.
In fact, there isn't events, A.I. and creativity, I think.
On November the 20th, Wednesday, that's actually also being held that's being held at the maths institute.
And that's certainly something to look out for. One of the kind of features, again,
is that we look to really motivate the presence of this institute within the context of being human in the 21st century.
How, despite all the concerns we have, or perhaps exactly because of those concerns,
we can understand an appropriate set of balanced interventions with this technology.
As I mentioned, that the site itself is not yet built.
And indeed, the whole process for selecting architects is in train as we speak.
To get that process underway. And this finally, just to say, the actually, I guess apart from a talk, I gave it up.
So this is the single earliest manifestation of actual activity,
which is all of you in this room listening to a variety of presentations as to why ethics has
a place in the consideration deliberations of of Oxford's extraordinary intellectual history.
And yeah, that really is my introduction.
This is one of the first in fact, the first two of these are very much like community meetings, town hall meetings,
where we're convening the interested parties together to understand what we're trying to achieve.
So that's my introduction. Thank you. Thanks very much indeed, Nigel.
When these seminars were conceived, it was not clear what form they should take.
But as Nigel's explained, one of the functions of a very major function of the Institute for Ethics in A.I. is to bring together Oxford academics and
researchers and students from from across a very wide range of centres and other institutions who often may not know each other,
even though they're working in closely related areas. Just half a mile apart.
So what we're planning to do in the first of these few seminars is not to go deeply into particular topics of interest,
but rather to show a variety of work that's going on in different parts of the university.
So those who attend can get to understand something of that ecosystem.
We're combining this event, as you know, with nibbles and drinks afterwards.
That's not just an added extra. That's an integral part of the conception.
That way, you if you hear speakers saying things that particularly interest you,
that people you might like to work with, call them afterwards, have a chat.
We've got plenty of time for that. So the way the the rest of today's session until then is going.
We've got three groups of speakers. The first two are from the ahero centre.
The next three from the Oxford Internet Institute. And then we began to round off with two speakers who focussed particularly on A.I. in ethics.
Sorry. Hey, I need medicine. I beg your pardon. So we we've got a mix here of some talks that are more theoretical.
How is it that philosophy fits into this mix?
How does philosophy influence practical ethics?
From Oxford Internet Institute, the focus is going to be partly on law, legal regulation.
And then when we get onto medicine, of course, we really are at the sharp end in a literal sense.
And we will hear there about what it's like actually working with a AI in medicine and regulation within the health service.
So without further ado, I'm going to ask Tom to kick off.
Tom is from the Oxford Internet Institute. Sorry, I'm not doing very well, am I?
I apologise. From the Here Heroes Centre, he trained Tom Douglas.
It trained as a medical doctor and philosopher and his senior research fellow and director of research and development at the Occiput,
Your Hero Centre for Practical Ethics. And he's also a Hugh Price fellow at Jesus College.
His research currently focuses on the ethics of predicting and modulating behaviour, a topic on which will shortly take up an ELC consolidator award.
So, Tom, over to you.
So do you have a centre is based within the faculty of philosophy and is devoted to to doing research in practical or applied ethics.
And as the name suggests, it's directed by at during zamili school.
He holds the chair in practical ethics and currently includes 24 other academic staff members, as well as five doctoral students.
Now we have a very broad remit, which is basically just to bring philosophical analysis to bear on practically important ethical questions,
questions about how well you want to live, how society ought to be arranged and so on.
And as you might suspect, given that broad agreement, we work on a fairly diverse range of topics, some of which are listed on the site.
Historically, you've had quite a strong focus on ethical issues raised by medicine and the life sciences.
But we've also worked in other areas like criminal justice, criminal justice, ethics, Internet ethics and military ethics.
Like I said, so several of our projects bring philosophy to bear on questions in ethics.
And what I want to do in that in the few minutes that I have left is just to briefly mentioned some of these.
I went out to cover all of them just by way of illustrating some of the ways in which rethink some
of the areas in which we think philosophical ethics might have something to say about AI ethics.
And then Caressa is going to go into a bit more detail about exactly how philosophy can contribute to debates about AI ethics.
OK, so the first strand of research that I wanted to mention is some work that Julian Cervalis Group and Guy Keohane are doing,
along with Chris Kinjo from Melbourne University on the role of public preferences in informing the development of ethical algorithms.
So as you're probably all aware, one of the challenges posed by, for example, autonomous vehicles is,
is that a specifying how these vehicles should respond when posed with what looked like ethical dilemmas.
So, say a choice between sacrificing an occupant of the vehicle and sacrificing a
pedestrian or the choice between running over an adult or running over a child.
So one natural response to this problem has been to kind of go out into the world and collect lots of data
about what the public think about how autonomous vehicles should respond to these kinds of situations.
And actually, quite a lot of that work has already been done.
But what's what's not at all obvious is what we should be doing with the data that we're getting out of this
empirical research that the social scientific data about what public the public preferences actually are.
Because it certainly doesn't seem to be the case that we should just kind of unthinkingly implement the public will in this kind of area.
So I suppose in a particular society that most people thought that autonomous vehicles you prioritise saving the lives of white people over others.
Clearly, I wouldn't follow that. That's what we should programme autonomous vehicles to do.
But on the other hand, it does seem plausible that at least some public attitudes should play some role in informing the design of these algorithms.
As I what GM Guy and Chris are thinking about is exactly what that role should be.
And just to kind of cut straight to one of their conclusions. One of their proposals,
probably the most controversial proposal has been that public preferences should be
put through a kind of philosophical filter before being built into the algorithm.
So we should first cheque with these preferences are actually consistent with at least some plausible and
widely held philosophical ethical theories and only preferences that make it through this kind of filter.
What they call laundered preferences should be fed into algorithm design.
OK, so the second strand of our research that I wanted to mention is a programme that I'm leading on
the ethics of predicting and influencing behaviour supported by the welcome trust in the U.S.
So this work has intersected with A.I. ethics and a few places.
One of these is on the topic of crime prediction,
where we've been doing some work with colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry to try to make some, I guess,
practical suggestions about how we could improve the kinds of crime prediction algorithms
that are increasingly being used both in criminal justice and in forensic psychiatrist.
And by improve, I mean here making more accurate, but also mitigating some of the ethical concerns about bias and unfairness.
But actually, the strand of our research that I wanted to go into a little bit more detail
about is some work that we're doing on the idea of a right to mental integrity,
because I think this is an interesting case of an area where existing thinking and medical ethics might have something of relevance to contribute,
to add to ethics. So it's very widely accepted, especially in medical ethics, but also elsewhere,
that we all possess something like a right to bodily integrity, a right against interference with our bodies.
So this right would be infringed if someone physically assaults you, but it would also be infringed.
For example, if a medical professional performed a medical procedure on you without your consent.
So the question that we're interested in is whether there might be an analogies right to mental integrity.
That would be a right against interference with your mind rather than your body.
And I mean, this is a question that hasn't been much discussed either in philosophy or law.
But we think it's going to be very relevant to medical ethics because quite a few medical
interventions look like they might infringe something like a right to mental integrity.
Perhaps the most obvious example here would be the use of compulsory psychiatric
interventions on patients who have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
But we think this question about mental integrity is also going to be relevant to
nonmedical interventions and interventions that are not at all physically invasive.
And I think one of the most interesting and important examples here would be what we might call A.I.S assisted manipulation.
So supplies and online platforms that something like Facebook develops and deploys an artificial intelligence that can identify the psychological
weaknesses of all of its users and almost perfectly target them with with
content that will maximise the length of time that they spend on the platform.
And as sort of maximally strengthen the desire to keep habitually checking that platform.
It seems reasonable to ask whether we could think of this technology as infringing a rights to mental integrity,
and we think that the answer to this question is going to depend on exactly how you understand that.
Right. What kind of philosophical basis you think that it has.
But at least on some plausible accounts of the right to mental integrity that we're considering.
It seems that that A.I. based manipulation could actually infringe the right to mental integrity in just the same way as,
for example, compulsory psychiatric interventions,
which might suggest that we should be regulating a basement manipulation and other similar forms of manipulation much more stringently,
perhaps a bit more closely to how we currently regulate psychiatry.
The third and final example that I wanted to say something about is the work of Hannah Maslova
and Steven Rainey on ethical issues raised by the use of neuro prosthetics for decoding speech.
So this is this is the philosophical part of a large multidisciplinary project called brain coding,
which is which is seeking to develop neuro prostheses or brain computer interfaces that could allow individuals who have lost the ability to speak,
to communicate.
So these devices would work by detecting brain signals, converting them into synthesised speech with the mediation of an eye language model.
And that language model would do a significant amount of predicting and rephrasing
in order to allow the speaker to speak at a kind of ordinary conversational pace.
And with more or less ordinary fluency. So one of the ethical issues here concerns the extent to which we could hold people
responsible for the utterances that they might make via a device like this.
So ordinarily, we do hold people responsible for their speech acts.
If someone says something racist or offensive, we tend to think that they can be blamed for that.
And that seems to presuppose that they're responsible for what they've said.
If I promise to do something, you'll probably think that I'm bound by that promise.
And again, that seems to presuppose that I'm responsible for what I said when I made the promise.
But one question is, to what extent would those kinds of responsibility assignments carry over to cases involving neuro prostheses of this sort?
Given that in these cases, there might be a much more significant gap between the kind of mental act of intending
or attempting to say something and the actual utterance that gets produced.
So how does the mediation of an artificial intelligence in this kind of system affect the responsibility of the speaker for the for the utterance?
How might the nature of A.I. make a difference to Assignment's response? But these are the kinds of questions that Stephen and Henare are addressing.
And again, to kind of briefly cut to one of the conclusions, they're arguing that many of these cases,
the mediation of artificial intelligence, could significantly diminish the responsibility of the speaker.
And in a way that might require us this sort of significantly, I think, some of our ethical norms regarding speech and conversation.
So those are some of the relevant areas on which the hero centre is working.
There are others as well. Mike Robillard, a military ethicist in the centre,
has been working on critiquing some of the existing debate about autonomous weapon systems or killer robots.
And one of the DEHL students appreciate Mishra is working on the extent to which we might need to revise some of our concepts,
like the standard of care and medical negligence in a world in which healthcare professionals are relying heavily on machine learning classifiers.
But I'm going to stop there and hand over to accuracy.
He's going to go into a bit more detail about some of the visual ways in which philosophy can kind of make
progress on the types of topics that I've been talking about and also to tell you about some of her research.
Thanks very much indeed, Tom. As you see, lots going on, and that's just the new hero.
Senator Kerissa is a research fellow at the you're hearing senator and also at the Welcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities.
So yet another senator we have in Oxford and is a member of Christchurch.
He works on digital ethics and moral and political philosophy more generally.
And she's the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, Overdue Gracen.
Thank you, Peter. It's great to be here. Thank you all for coming.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the place of philosophy in the ethics of a I have philosophy 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 good and rights and obligatory things like that,
and maybe explored the tooth conditions for which a particular utterance was true or false.
And then in the 1970s, I learnt 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.
But philosophers started to think about feminism, questions about abortion and sexual orientation and discriminations on.
This really changes discipline 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. I read about these moments in Lost for History, I always had a bit of jealousy in part.
I just came to philosophy 30 or 40 years later.
You know, how interesting and how important the change discipline in a way that can contribute positively to the world.
And one moment that was particularly important was 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 out on for 40 years in which people who had syphilis were observed and they weren't treated.
Even though treatment was available, there was a huge scandal.
We pushed off the discipline of medical ethics forward.
And I think in many ways we are 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 on the camera and a legal scandal, amongst others, that we make tangible that the need for for ethics.
So practical 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 a 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 given different answers to.
This is just a small sample. And although there are many controversies within within this debate, maybe the most important of which is.
Are there more authorities and what do we mean by more authorities?
There's much more consensus and disagreement within the debate and perhaps the most important points of consensus is that philosophy can
offer a 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 in that decision and with the hope that consumption rises, can make debates sharper.
It can mitigate shorter. And it can make it less income to suit.
So what is conceptual analysis and what kinds of things does it impute? It includes things like clarifying concepts.
Sometimes people are fighting about something and they're not even talking about the same thing.
On occasion, making sure that people are talking about the same thing even leads to solving problems.
This is something that we decided defended. Of course, that's not always the case.
Sometimes philosophy can provide nuance like any other discipline.
Ethics have 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 impermissible,
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 be very attractive in a first glance,
and then you start working out what the implications,
either practical implications or theoretical implications and certainly doesn't seem that attractive anymore.
A good example is how your personal data has been treated.
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 poverty differs from
personal data and suddenly it doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore.
Pointing out contradictions of this cause is full of contradictions and fallacies both in the media but also in parliament and everywhere in between.
And flusters can point out those distinguishing questions of fact and 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 decide.
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 either alive or they're dead. And suddenly the philosopher comes and says, well, what do you mean by that?
Is it the death of the body, the death of consciousness, the death of the person,
the death of the interests and rights that typically attached to people?
I'm finding providing theory and in practical ethics.
Of course, there's a lot of theory that comes both from normative 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.
So that. Practical cases and also empirical facts inform the theory and change it and polish it.
And this is an interesting process because, you know, philosophy has a bad reputation for a lot of disagreements.
There are not a lot of progress in consensus.
But in fact, when you study in detail of the the history of philosophy and theories get very much polished.
First, there are consensus on some things that they used to that there was disagreement in the past.
But even when there is disagreement, for example, consequentialist 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 practical cases.
Secondly, it's really important for philosophy to identify moral problems.
And then 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 one, seen as a problem, weren't seen as problematic.
So, for example, is not informing patients on a diagnoses randomising patients to treatment or placebo without informing them that they were
part of a research or even conducting very invasive examinations like rectifies examination in patients who were unconscious.
And this one seen as, you know, doctors having bad intentions or anything like it was just an.
They love. Their philosophy can inspire moral thought.
Through arguments on thought, experiments and analogies, we can raise moral thought about prejudice and invite people to consider certain situations.
And in so doing, stimulate their their moral thinking and also challenge moral intuitions.
And here there's a very important role for public philosophy and for public and engaging with the public in general.
And then finally, philosophy can provide experience. Good ethicists have extensive experience tackling difficult issues.
And it would be a waste to not involve such so much knowledge in a time when there's so much at stake.
Of course, a person doesn't have to have a pay student athletes or have published in the best ethical journals to have good ethical insight.
But spending also your hours of most of your days thinking about ethical questions, trying different methodologies,
learning about past these pitfalls does provide some kind of experience that can that can be of use.
And in this sense, private life is his 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 and medical ethics just cite one difference and that makes it is going to make it very, very different.
And also, we have a lot to learn from successes, but also from failures.
I mean, 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 99 don't get published. And sometimes researchers can't 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 this is a huge challenge for digital ethics to detect. So just to finish.
I'm involved in the following research projects. I'm thinking about what digital effects can learn from 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 Delphi.
And strangely enough, we haven't thought much about the ethics of prediction and what makes a prediction ethical.
And most importantly, the thing that I'm most excited about is editing the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics.
Many philosophers in the room are going to participate in that. Which is great.
And it's going to cover all sorts of things from sex and friendship in the digital age to democracy.
Does fear 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 day when we said.
Hearing you talk about the old timers that they're interested in ethics,
I noticed that two of those papers that you were highlighting were actually in a volume that I coedited back in 1992.
Thank you very much. Both Tom Charissa, your hero, senator.
Doing lots of interesting work. You'll get a chance to catch up later.
Over over nibbles and drinks. One innovation that we're bringing into these seminars, we won't get to have use it very much this time.
But our intention is, is to make it a general feature is to enable audience feedback through questions.
Now, we're planning at the very end this time to have a session on questions.
If you want to suggest a question that you'd like to have discussed by the speakers.
If you go to Sligo dot com, that's s l i d o Sligo dot com.
And. Type in A.I. ethics, one word as this session to log into, and if you submit a question there,
then that question will magically appear on my device here.
And you in the audience can vote for the question or questions that you'd most like to have answered.
So at the end, once the speakers that have all spoken, the intention is to have a short question and answer session.
Then I hope that will be interesting and it is at least an interesting experiment.
Okay, now we're moving from the hero centre to the Oxford Internet Institute, and Victoria Nash is our first speaker.
She's deputy director, associate professor and senior policy fellow there.
Her research focuses on normative and practical challenges of regulating online behaviour with a particular focus on child protection,
content, moderation and human rights.
And Vicki is just going to give a quick introduction to the Internet Institute before handing over to Sandra and Brian.
Coming up, speak. I am reminded of when my rule never I should never offer slides if I speak for
less than five minutes because I would probably spend five minutes finding it.
Thank you very much for the introduction. Thank you to the previous speakers.
As a political theorist who did her defo here many years ago, she would have loved to have your presentation.
That right beginning of my page to experts,
to the whole three years to figure out how to explain to her why last week mattered, why my work is so crucially important.
So I those pieces fit within just a couple of minutes of explanation about what the oil is.
And then I'll hand over to my colleagues. We will take down a great depth to give an indication of what type of research we do.
For those of you that don't know, we're relatively new. I love it.
Every time we do have a new centre, it's too creative because I feel like an old hand.
We've been around since 2001. We were set up to be a multidisciplinary centre based within social sciences,
but multidisciplinary focussing on the societal implications of digital technologies.
It's funny looking back, actually. I mean, the question that we are asking now are many in many ways the same questions that you're asking in 2001,
but perhaps applied to new and innovative technologies.
But I think that, you know, so much of what the new institute is going to do is is hugely exciting to us.
And I'm frankly very delighted to see, you know,
significant investment in this field and new opportunities for us to collaborate both with the humanities, but actually across the way.
University is the chart that Niger presented showed us. So, yes, congratulations on those that helped make this happen.
I work in this area. I would say a sort of maybe threefold.
The first is, if you like, in the very broadest sense.
So what you want an Nigel covered at the very beginning in the sort of, you know,
the array of different topics and areas is just fundamental to what we do.
So, you know, big, broad questions about.
About innovation, about the development of new tools, new ways of using artificial intelligence to develop new products, new forms and functions.
Are those in everyday life questions about what this means for how we regulate and govern these technologies?
This this is just our everyday business and it's something that that all of my 90 50 faculty are frankly engaged in.
However, there's a much narrower sentence in which actually quite the questions of ethics and I arise in a
number of very specific sort of research has portfolios to which you're going to hear about tonight.
Since 2014, I'm pleased to note that we've had in-house philosophies.
We've had I've in the very early days of the.
Let me John, if you're ready with his work around information, ethics, addressing questions like sort of moral, artificial,
Egil, evil or the morality of artificial agents that that's been with us is safe runabouts of five, six years.
But actually, we don't just have lots of both of these questions now.
So as we've brought in several philosophers on top of each on it, what you're going to hear from shortly.
But we also now have lawyers like Sandra who's going to speak to you.
We have political scientists.
We have data scientists again, though, whose work is fundamentally concerned with questions of ethics and I of writ large.
And in those cases, it covers issues such as things like what constitutes fairness or unfairness, discrimination, if you like,
in the uses of I brought political questions about once you once you maybe identified principles of fairness,
how you might go about regulating for those or holding companies to account.
We cover applied questions such as, again,
if you if you identify unfair practises or sort of sources of lack of diversity in data collection, what does that mean for innovation?
What does that mean for data collection? What does it mean for privacy?
So if you like the fact that a multi disciplinary means that we aren't just approaching this, certainly from a philosophical angle,
but we are taking some of these sort of core philosophical questions and playing them out across different disciplines and different topics,
we hope, all with the aim of improving not just research outputs, research,
understanding these issues, but also, if you like, societal understanding, societal practises.
So if we have a sort of a broad focus, this very narrow focus in specific projects, again, which we'll hear about shortly.
I just want to flag up. But we also have a focus on this in our teaching.
We have full graduate degrees, two masters. One is social data science.
One, social science, the Internet and two corresponding defo programmes.
And in each of those, again, these broad questions around ethics and I arrive in different places.
We actually have got a pure philosophy paper, for example, in one of our master's degrees.
In another, we we embrace the core questions about what things like fairness and transparency would look like in the practise of social data science.
So again, I really applaud, I think, the desire to ensure that the work of the new institute will also include content,
fair fit for new courses, new option papers. Certainly we find it immensely satisfying experience to deliver those to our students.
I'm happy to take questions later on on what the eyes, the eyes doing in this area.
But it's my great pleasure to hand over to my. Such as?
So next up is Sandra Baktir, who's associate professor and senior research fellow in law and ethics of A.I.,
Big Data and robotics, as well as Internet regulation at the AIS.
We've heard her current research focuses on the legal and ethical implications of a high profile,
including profiling, explaining lendable A.I. and algorithmic bias.
Thank you so much for this introduction.
I'm very excited to be able to talk to you a little bit about the research that I do with a couple of my colleagues here with you.
And as Bikila mentioned, I am a lawyer, so I usually look at things from a legal perspective and.
But what I want to do is actually talk about free aspects where I think that the eyes disrupting
legal concepts and I think the only way to fix that problem is actually via this mega approach.
So I'm actually arguing that the law might not be fit for purpose,
which is why we need ethicists and mulches to work to get it to actually give new strength to the law that we currently have.
And yeah, I want to give you three examples where I think we need to focus a bit more.
And one of the areas that I'm focussing on as well. One is accountability, one to Spanish and one is privacy.
So I start with accountability. I've chosen the example of loan applications and how we have done this previously in the past.
Usually when you go into a human human setting, if you go to a bank and you apply for a loan, the loan officer will ask you a couple of questions.
They might ask you what your income is. If you have any savings, your employment history, all this questions make sense.
There is an intuitive link where a person ask you about your financial status in order to find out if you've gone before the loan or not.
There's an intuitive connexion there. What we see now is they've been moving away from those traditional data sources to make decisions.
We use our traditional data sources.
So a couple of examples here where credit institutions are now using Facebook profiles to decide if somebody should get at them.
So they look at you, profile pictures, the friends that you have on Facebook, the groups that you join,
the things that you post, the things that you like, and they infer if you're reliable borrower, not.
Similar things happen in the insurance space where also, for example, profile social profile,
that network information is being used to define if somebody should get insurance and what premiums should get.
So but that's not the only thing. In general, whenever we make decisions, we start to use very untraditional data.
That includes clicking behaviour, typing behaviour, geo location, ice and ice tracking,
all of that to infer certain things about you, things that can be very privacy,
invasive and unintentional and very counter-intuitive, where I don't really understand all of my data says above me,
I have no idea how my browsing behaviour will affect my credit rating in the future.
And this information can be and is rare that replicates it and and shared with a lot of people and not just in.
Financial services, also important decisions, has to go to jail. Who can go to university?
If you get hired, fired, promoted. All of this information of big data is being used for that.
And that pose questions for accountability.
Because if in the future, if I don't get a loan or don't get a job, the first thing that comes to mind is to ask why?
Why did I not get a job? What happened? I want to have an explanation.
And this is why I started thinking about this topic and look at it at first from a legal
perspective to figure out if we do have a right that Ogwyn physicians have been explained to you,
because that would make a lot of sense. And just looking at from the legal perspective,
what I found is that I don't think we actually have a legally binding right that things have been explained to you.
I was not very happy with the outcome of my paper. It's very hard to say from my academic perspective to actually admit to that.
But it wasn't very happy with the outcome of the paper.
But this was a starting point where I started to think about I don't actually care so much about what the law says.
Just because something is not legally required doesn't mean it's not ethically desired.
Which was the reason why Grant and Chris Russum and I got together and we now have
a research programme at which is called The Governance of Emerging Technologies.
So bretonneux that we'll be talking a couple of minutes is an ethicist and Chris Russell is a machine learning expert.
So, yes, what basically starts like a joke in the sense that a lawyer, a philosopher and a scientist walk into a bar, which we did,
and we spent three hours screaming at each other because we wanted to figure out what a good explanation would actually look like.
What do we think of good explanations? Because we set the legal question of why.
I wanted to know what is it that you want to know? So Brand was very much interested in the trust side of things.
For him, it was very important to figure out what is justified, to believe what a good argument is, what make arguments valid.
And I didn't care about that at all. I went to a justice and accountability. I wanted to be able to contest the decision.
I'm not happy with it. And Curtis, a computer scientist, didn't care about each of those things.
Just want to buck his coat and said, what's going on in the black box? So even though we were all very, very passionate about explanations,
we started to understand that we think very different things about that and see the explanations in very different ways.
But we finally found the solution and actually wrote a paper together and which
has come come to factual explanations to try to reconcile those approaches.
And our method actually allows you to understand a little bit of what's going on.
The black box also gives you more trust in a system and gives you accountability because you would be able to,
for example, contested decision, not happy with it. So the exciting part of that is that it actually got traction.
And Google has implemented our our method.
Now, last year in intensive LOSO nine can actually play with logarithms and understand what's going on in a black box.
And Google is not the only one who is very fond of our idea because IBM, Microsoft and FLOC also implemented our our idea.
So what that means is if you scream a lot to each other, it actually pays off at some point.
But we also learnt that explanations are only one facet of true accountability, because explanations are not justifications.
I can tell you, for example, I'm not giving you the loan because I don't like you face explanations.
It doesn't mean it's justified. So actually, what you also want to look at is at the inferences to predictions and the opinions that algorithms out
about you write all that big data is being collected about you and very sensitive things can be inferred.
For example, if you're pregnant, if you're alive of worry, or if you could work, if you should get promotion,
if you have undiagnosed disorders, all of that information can be very progress, invasive.
And that is the actual thing that you're concerned with. So, again, I look at it from my eye, from a legal perspective,
and try to look at data protection law because, you know, this is very close to your private life.
So having friends is one example of personal data. You would get a lot of data protection rights.
And again, what I found is that I actually disrupts the law in a very and traditional way where we have to think creatively about those problems.
So, Brandon, I wrote a paper together which is called A Rights to Reasonable Inferences, Rethinking their protection law and Age Data.
Any are actually calling for new standards because we found that the law, as it currently stands, is not good enough to protect us.
As you can see, it's 130 pages trying to make the point that law is not good enough.
It was actually planned to be a hundred and sixty, but read threatened if they were to work with me again if I don't stop writing.
So it's just 30 pages. But it's very important to point out that we found a lot of loopholes in the law,
some of which are that we don't even know if inferences of personal data.
So all the assumptions that algorithms are making are being made above.
It's not clear if it actually wasn't the PR, even if they do fall on the data protection law.
What the purpose of data protection law is, is not to regulate how we make decisions about you.
So if you have a problem over how you're being evaluated, how you've been seen,
how you assess, you would need to find another law that helps you do that.
Data protection law doesn't give you a remedy over how are you being seen by algorithms.
And that is quite problematic because as we've already mentioned very often, we don't have standards for accurate,
reasonable decision making because in essence, a lot of times we don't have a rights to get a job or insurance or don't go to university.
So if you don't have any loss and regulate how those decisions have to be made and data protection doesn't give you doubts,
maybe it's the ethical thing to think about what would be reasonable.
And that leads me to the current research project that we've just started,
which is a right to reasonable inferences in online advertising and in financial services.
And we just had to postdocs starting with us.
One is a philosopher, the other one a legal scholar.
And we are trying to figure out what would be a reasonable standard for inferentially takes in those two sectors in the future.
We're going to look at other sectors as well. That's will include, for example, health, employment and criminal justice.
But this is the current focus of our project.
The last area where I see that A.I. is actually disrupting the law has to do with non-discrimination law.
Again, that's something that we are all aware of, that whenever we talk about the IBE, you also have to think about bias and discrimination.
So, again, I did look at non-discrimination law and tried to figure out if the law is actually good
enough and it's good enough to protect us against those unintended and undesirable risks.
And again, I have to say, it doesn't and it doesn't.
It actually is not really the laws fold or technology fold. It's just something that happened.
If an Oscar nomination law is an answer to undesired behaviour of people, right.
That means that very often we want to regulate or prohibit that people are
unethical to each other or being racist or sexist or homophobic to each other.
But the way that algorithms do that is very, very different than humans.
So, for example, if you think about press discrimination,
suppress discrimination means that the same product is offered to different people at different prices in the offline world.
You will be there. It would be very easy for you to figure it out.
You can just go to different stores and compare fruits and prices and pick the products that you think is fair or appropriate.
For example, Tesco doesn't let you into the store anymore.
You know that you have been excluded from the market. How do you know that in an online world?
Right. How do you know if you're actually being offered the best price? Do you know what the prices are?
People get offered. And do you know the advertising is that you don't see.
Right. So that kind of discrimination, you don't feel it anymore.
Whereas in the off line, Wolf, there will be often D ability of the complainant to see that something's off.
Something feels unfair, unjust, but that sends a feeling of unfairness might not be as easy to grasp anymore.
And similarly here with the law, if you look at the the classes that we want to protect, that relates to sex and gender,
ethnicity, religious beliefs, because we had historical experiences where people have used that to discriminate against people.
Right. So this is how we constructed the world, how we group people.
But algorithms might move people completely differently, right?
It could be the diagrammed start to discriminate against people who are born on a Tuesday, have brown socks and like dogs.
But this class of people doesn't find information non-discrimination law because we never had it or similar here with video gamers,
which, for example, in China is something that could cause your credit score to drop.
Obviously, that class of people doesn't find any protection non-discrimination law, but maybe it shouldn't.
Maybe. So this is D.M. the project that we are also working on, trying to figure out if the law doesn't give you enough protection.
What would be the ethical thing to do? How can we increase and protect fairness and then algorithmic world?
So, yeah, basically does the programme that we're currently working on.
And I actually think that the one of the reasons why I'm so excited about all this, what's happening,
because I think it finally is clear to everyone that if we want to use a AI for a good year, we need to think of at least three perspectives.
Need to think about is the law actually helping you? Is a law good enough?
And if it's not, what would be desirable? What would the ethical thing to do?
And then actually map it again. Technology and figure out if it's actually feasible and if you do that,
you can harness the full potential of A.I. but make sure that you protect human rights.
Thank you. Thanks very much indeed, Sandra.
And now Brent, who is Sandra's colleague. Brent Mitchell shot, is a philosopher and postdoctoral research fellow in data ethics at the Oh I.
He specialises in fairness, interprete ability, group privacy and other aspects of the ethical governance of A.I. and complex algorithmic systems.
Over you, Brent. Yes, so thank you so much for inviting me into this.
And thank you, Senator, for being great introduction of our research programme.
So what I'm going to talk about a bit is I'm going to talk about one of my most recent pieces of work,
which I think speaks to the question of the relationship between law and ethics in the space of a I and particularly talks about the the frameworks,
the initiatives that we now have, over 100 of them that are in some way trying to define the right sort of high level
concepts or principles or values or tenets to in some way guide the development of A.I.,
the government's way of use. I salute the talk is going to be based on this paper, which just came out about a week ago,
where I look at the role the principles can and perhaps should play in the governance of A.I. ethically.
Now, my paper, despite having come out a week ago, is apparently already out of date.
I thought we only had 84 initiatives from across the world, but we have over 100 now.
And I hope this gets crossing the gravity of the situation.
And I suppose my main concern is that if we have all these initiatives,
youre essentially creating a market where developers can pick and choose the set of principles that works best for them.
Chris Russell was joking the other day that he. Here are my principles.
If you don't like them, I have a bunch of others. But to me, the risk there is it gives the impression that there's sort of one way to do ethics,
that you have a high level set of principles that you were then going to specify into a set of practical requirements.
And unsurprisingly, you should expect that if you have both lots of different sets of principles, but also leave it up to,
say, individual development teams or individual companies to choose how to specify those principles on the ground.
You're going to get requirements that don't match with each other requirements and may be contradictory.
And essentially, you can end up in a situation of extreme more relativism.
And to me, that that that thought, that sort of ethics or at least ethical frameworks are there as something to,
let's see, replace regulation or at least self-regulation can be seen as a way to replace hard regulation.
That's me sort of does a disservice to the actual value that ethics can have.
And in particular, the value of the ethics and the law in working together in a good way can have.
So what I'm interested in is basically how can we make these ethics frameworks actually work within a,
you know, an approach where we're open to hard regulation?
Now, I'm happy that this has come up already, but it's just to say there's a clear connexion between bioethics and medical ethics.
So I don't have to make the case for that. So thank you. A number of people mentioned that, actually.
But just to say that there was some work done recently, a couple of papers done recently that was trying to look for some sort of consensus
across all these different different frameworks and initiatives that we had.
And what in particular, this piece of work from the A.I. from People Project.
And also, it was adopted by the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence,
is that there's a set of principles and very closely mimic the classic principles of medical ethics.
And that's really interesting because I think actually looking at medical ethics and looking how a development compares to it can tell you a lot
about whether we should expect this sort of principled form of self governance to work in a similar way in a development as it does in medicine.
That's not to say that medical ethics is without its failures about a principled approach is going to solve everything.
It's just to say it's definitely a case where the use of principles for ethical governance, for ethical decision making is very clear.
It's very prominent and it has had impact in practise.
So what we're going to do in the remainder of my few minutes is just to look at those two professions a little bit closer and see, well,
how exactly does a development compare to this profession where we've seen a principled approach to ethics emerge and have some success?
And so there's four different characteristics I want to look at here. The first is the existence of common aims.
And what I mean by that is that medicine has doctors have fiduciary duties towards their patients.
The practise is broadly guided by a common set of aims, which is to benefit the health and well-being of the patient.
And of course, we will disagree about how to do that best in practise.
At the very least, talking about, say, public public interests versus the interests of individual patient.
But there is this sort of commonality. There is this common ground from which ethical decision making can actually proceed.
And that is reflected in the fact that you have very strong fiduciary duty between professionals and patients.
What that allows for is. Basically, co-operative approach to ethical decision making to specifying these principles.
And I'm not sure that that level of cooperation can be taken for granted in the space of a development at the very least.
If you're talking about privately developed Dahai, the initial fiduciary duties owned by the development team will be to the
shareholders of the company rather than the users of people affected by the system.
And so my concern is, if you don't have the sort of common grounding of the direction we're all travelling,
then I'm not sure that you actually can have that that you're going to end up with with
ethical decision making that's fundamentally competitive rather than cooperative.
And clearly, that's that's not something that's conducive to finding an appropriate balance between different interests and practise.
The second characteristic I want to look at is the role of professional history.
And this is just to say that medicine has obviously an oppression for a very long time.
We have codes of conduct. We have accounts of what it means to be a good doctor.
These are captured on things like credit go through more recently, the Aimé code, medical ethics.
These are documents that have been revised over time, the very longstanding, the very detailed.
They give opinions on particular types of interventions.
And the fact that they have been sought,
tested over time and revised is one of the reasons that they they continue to actually be useful in day to day professional practise.
Now, if you compare that to the state of a development, I'm going to use software engineering here as an analogue to to a development.
We do have professional bodies. I see ACM in the eye triply, of course, being two biggest ones.
And we do have codes of ethics. But in comparison to medicine there, the relatively short comparison, relatively abstract.
The ACM one was revised recently, but still remains comparatively abstract when compared to, say, the main code of ethics.
And there's research,
a recent research that suggests that the codes of ethics actually have very little influence on day to day decision making of engineers,
which is clearly a problem because if you had to have a code of ethics,
but it isn't shown to be particularly effective in the sense of influencing the behaviour of engineers, then you have to question what is the actual.
The third characteristic on a briefly touch on is just the methods that we have for translating principles into practise.
The fundamental problem that we have here in the ethics frameworks is that they're
they're based on or they rely on what can be called essentially contested concepts,
essentially very abstract concepts that can have lots of different meanings in practise.
If I asked you if I took a survey of this room, well, who thinks that a system should treat people fairly?
I imagine pretty much everybody would raise their hand.
And yet everybody may have a completely different sense of what fairness would actually mean in practise.
And the point is that those different means of fairness can be rationally held.
They can be genuine. They can be defended. We shouldn't expect a single correct meaning of any of these terms.
The problem that you have is that we've reached consensus on what the correct, essentially contested concepts are.
We've we've reached this high level consensus. But to me, that doesn't actually reflect any sort of true consensus.
And more just is a way to mask sort of really important normative and political disagreements have a framework.
We agreed in the framework. But we certainly don't agree to what it means in practise.
And of course, the other problem is that those sorts of concepts don't translate automatically into practical requirements.
That is a very difficult process. Medicine has things like professional societies and boards, ethics review committees,
accreditation and licencing schemes, pure self governance standards.
All these things help you actually do that. Translation and practise.
Software engineering does have some of these things, but it's lacking it's lacking mechanisms that are of, say, similar stature, similar importance.
I think one of the reasons for that is that the profession would not be legally
recognised in a legally recognised as a profession in the same way that medicine is.
What I mean by that is doctors require a licence to practise software engineers, in some cases in limited contexts,
do need a licence to practise, but it's in no way of the same importance or the same sort of the same coverage as as medical licences.
And so this lack of sort of legal recognition of the profession is a serious problem because ethics tends
to professional ethics at least really has teeth when it actually has legal mechanisms to back it up.
When doing something unethical in your day to day behaviour as a as a professional could actually lead to,
say, losing the ability to practise your profession.
And so just to conclude here, I think we have a number of sort of legal gaps within ethical way.
One is really important ones that there is not this legal recognition of A.I. developments as professions.
And a lot of the initiatives we have are based on human rights frameworks or other
sorts of frameworks that are not directly legally binding in the same way as,
say, to Judy Pyar would be. And so to move forward, I think we can do a couple of things.
One is to start thinking about ethics more in the sense of a business or organisational ethics and less as a professional ethics.
Both sides are important. But I think there's too much emphasis placed on individuals doing wrong things software engineer,
individual developers doing wrong things and less about the same business model that they're
working within or the organisational practises themselves being unethical in some way.
We had a chance to do that with a High-Level Expert Group. There were red lines initially supposed to be draughted to basically send out types of AOG.
It should not be developed in Europe. In the end, those red lines were taken out.
To me, these would been a very strong signal of A.I. Ethics is also a business ethics.
And then just finally, I think we may need to revisit the idea of licencing developers of high risk A.I. applications.
And we I think more than anything, we just need to develop much stronger empirical evidence base.
This based on case studies, on specific, specific ethical challenges.
So we can really start to understand how we disagree and agree with each other
in practise about what these different concepts and principles go on there.
Thank you very much. The.
What we're getting is something of a taste of the range of very difficult issues that will need to be addressed by the institute.
We're going to end with a session on in medicine. Comparisons have been drawn between medicine and they are quite a few times already.
But now we're going to hear what A.I. in medicine is really like.
And our first speaker is Professor Gil McBain.
He's professor of statistical genetics, director of the Big Data Institute and amongst various other honours, a fellow of the Royal Society.
Five years ago, he co-founded the Company Genomics P.L.C. to use genomics to improve healthcare.
You know, I think the sort of the kindest way of describing me in the context of this room is very much as a non expert,
at least when it comes to ethics. I am a statistician and a geneticist,
and I've worked in the field of using genetics to understand human disease and to identify
opportunities for new therapies or to better sort of predict where people are on that trajectory.
I've done that for many years. And over the last few years,
my role has shifted a bit from purely being someone who was doing research to someone
who has been thinking about the kinds of infrastructure and kinds of communities that
you need to build in order to make sure that this growing part of biomedical research
is sort of done well at the university level and translated well and ethically,
of course, into practise. And so behind that is my very much my role as the director of the Big Data Institute,
which is one of these recent now not quite the latest new centres to have appeared within University of Oxford.
For those of you who don't know us, where we are, a physical thing,
where a new institute and new building up the hill in the old growth campus, and this is somewhere between 350 and 500.
And then you can how you can people within this institute but who are united by this desire to use a data
driven approach to understanding the causes of human disease and identifying groups to intervention.
So we're entirely dry land. We're entirely computational, as it were.
And really what we are about is creating this fuel for a car.
Now, we've heard an awful lot about this sort of the ethical issues of how you actually
use A.I. in context and under the regulatory or the legal aspects around that.
Perhaps what we haven't heard quite so much about is the process by which you can
acquire what is the fundamental part that has to go into any are a are a process,
which is very much the data itself. Within the institute, just very briefly, there are four types of things that we do.
First is about how we measure things. This sort of measurement technologies.
The second is about how we bring all those data together to create the research, ready the analysis,
ready datasets that our researchers and others can come on in and peer into
and try and identify the structure that ultimately leads to these insights.
We have people from statistics, computer science, engineering, epidemiology, genomics, et cetera, developing methods.
That is, if you like, the VII algorithms which are going to peer into this these kinds of rich data set.
And then finally, and probably why in here is that the fourth pillar of what we do with this institute is to
think hard about the much more the why does societal aspects of this data driven landscape.
So issues around consent, issues around privacy, security issues.
Right. Governance issues around sharing intellectual property.
And so. And we made a decision right at the start of putting this institute together that this was something that we wanted to go on.
Actually, in the building, it's such an integral part of doing biomedical research these days.
And the issues that us that come out of this kind of research are so deep that if we don't train people in how you
should think about conducting this kind of research and you don't build the right practises into how people do it,
prosecuting the research programmes actually at the point of implementation, then you've kind of you're starting on the wrong foot.
So we very much put that at the heart of the institute. A march of ethos is based within the Big Data Institute.
And we very recently we got funding from EPA Sarsae to set up a new central doctoral training in health data science.
One of the key pillars of that programme being that these data scientists and machine learners and so on would be trained
very much alongside all the other skills in what they need in the skills to think about the problems from that standpoint.
So it really, really is central to how we we think.
And if anyone's interested in use cases coming up to Lausanne, talking about the types of problems that we're working on,
the types of dilemmas that we're faced with, then please do get in touch.
We'd be more than happy to talk.
So I just want to say just a couple of things about at least my sort of personal perspectives on why the types of research that we're doing now,
which is very much within the tradition of biomedical or medical research.
Why those are a bit different and why they're raising new challenges from from the sort of the ethical perspective.
And I think a really important point to start, which is perhaps not so well understood,
is actually that the growth of AI and machine learning technologies within biomedical
research has really led to something of a shift in how medical research itself is conducted.
And this comes back to this question of data. How we how we get the data is.
So it used to be that in medical science, you had a hypothesis, you.
You decided I wanted to test some particular question.
And off the back of that, you designed an experiment, not experiment, gave you some data.
You analyse the data on the back of that and make some conclusions. And maybe you came up with a new hypothesis.
Importantly, those data were collected specifically for that purpose.
And you went out you explain to people why you were going to collect that data and what you hoped to learn come out of it.
That's a very clean way of doing science. But clearly, it's not massively scalable.
There's one question that you could ask of those data and essentially one.
Now, about ten, fifteen years ago, biomedical research sort of took a side step, it changed direction a bit in how it collected data,
and a lot of that came out of the world of genomics where people realised who had been studying how genes affect diseases.
They'd been studying sort of their favourite gene and their favourite disease in a particular combination.
And the literature was full of incredibly bad results that never heated and were massively underpowered.
But 15 years ago, what happened was a change in technology.
Changes in technology that start things. That legs to our us being able to experiments not just on one gene and a handful of individuals,
but the entire genome in tens of thousands of individuals.
And that led to this idea that rather than going in with your specific hypothesis, actually the most powerful thing is to go in without a hypothesis.
You go in and you just collect data and you let the data tell you what the answer is.
And that idea has very much percolated from just thinking about, well, let's study the whole genome.
And one disease, the Genome Association studies was essentially that idea to the idea that you go in and you
collect the genome and you collect everything that you possibly can about an individual's health,
environment, lifestyle, finances. You just collect everything you can.
And later on, you decide what research from. No.
The success of this programme is sort of made real by something with the UK biobank, which many of you will probably know about,
but about somewhere between one and two percent of adults within the UK have consented to have their entire medical data,
their entire genome sequence.
I'm huge Moundsville axillary information about them, lifestyle and cognition that their parents, sometimes the children.
Huge amounts of information made available to people like me and people like you and people in companies and people in China and people in the U.S.,
all you have to do is this to sign up to a very few sort of restrictions about what you're going to do with the data.
You have to say roughly what you're going to do with the data. You have to say that you're not going to try and identify these people.
But beyond that, it's really not very much that you have to say that you're going to do.
And as a consequence of that, there are people all over the world probing the tiniest details,
the most intimate information, about half a million people within the U.K., some probably indeed within this.
So it's an example of how our way of doing research is really shifting.
This shift is exactly what enables the whole A.I. revolution in medicine and health care.
But it, of course, brings up all sorts of questions about what it means to be informed about research project, which has no end.
What it means in terms of can you ever can you ever comprehend the sorts of things that I might
learn about you if I bring together lots of sorts of information that you would never have had?
And what what would you like to know if I can, for example, predict whether you're going to get out on this disease in the next 10, 20, 50 years?
Huge amounts of new challenges arising from it, which are where only, I think, just begin to describe the topic that I shall shut out.
Thanks very much. Thank you, Joe.
It's interesting how some of the points that you raised there actually could be potentially revolutionary,
revolutionary or other areas of science, too, and views about philosophy and science.
The idea that you play data and then you form a hypothesis rather than the other way round.
Our final speaker today is Jess Morley. She's policy lead at Oxford.
Evidence based medicine data lab research assistant at the Oxford Internet Institute Digital Ethics Lab and a subject matter expert,
the NHS NHS X, whose aim is to drive digital transformation within the NHS.
Here she focuses on the ethics policies and regulations needed to enable the use of
healthcare data for the improvement of outcomes whilst minimising the associated risks.
Thank you. I also don't have any slices. Borlase causes too much, so I'm also very aware that I am kind of the stop gap between you and wine.
I'm getting out of this very room, so I will try and not be very boring.
I think what you have had so far is a really wonderful introduction to what I am trying to talk about,
because I sit in a number of different intersections in that I am both an employee of
the university and a student at the university in a different part of the university.
And I also am working in academia and I am actually making policy today because of Puzder.
I have to very much be talking from the Oxford perspective. But if you have questions about specific things afterwards.
But really what I try and do and I think sonder faced it really, really well is look at what is legally required,
which in the context of medicine and data use, tends to be consent, anonymization, then what is ethically desirable and what's the standard?
And then we try and develop what we refer to as a principle proportionate approach that
tries to move the what of a ethics into the how of ethics and to really operationalise it.
Look at a number of different things. First of all, how can I actually help?
I think this is something that often gets missed in ethical conversations.
People always talk about the risks, but actually a very big risk, particularly from the perspective of the NHS,
that has a duty to capitalise on all of the ways that you can enable healthcare is the opportunity cost of not letting it happen.
So to try and look at why does it help, which tends to be largely in categories such as diagnostic screening.
And Josh, that's where most research currently focuses,
primarily because of that's where the data is more easily accessible and it's why it's standardised.
Population health. This is time basically better versions and less bad versions of Google flu discovery,
such as drug discovery and what's sometimes referred to as P4 medicine or precision medicine.
And those are the kind of areas that we look at in terms of why we think it might help.
And then the question is, how can it actually hurt? You've already heard many of the reasons why.
And one of the things that I've co-authored is one of those many ethical principles that Brent had up on that on that slide,
which is the Department of Health and Social Care has a code of conduct for the NHS.
So it's called the NHS Code of Conduct for data driven health care technologies, which just really both of your tongue.
The reason it is cool that is because most of the applications that we see
currently in these within the NHS are within the healthcare sector at large.
It's at least at the frontline do not fall into the category of being a I, yet they tend to be fastpass, simpler basic statistics.
So we've tried to encompass it with data, didn't get it. But the things that try and look at is that that code of conduct and almost everything that
we've heard about so far tends to focus on just the individual protecting the individual,
which stems from this connexion with medical ethics being around protecting the person.
And as we have seen, autonomy, beneficence, not maleficent justice and acceptability.
And was that's really been important when you're operating and thinking of the perspective from a systems perspective.
You also need to think about how ethics, how ethical risks can arise.
A number of other different levels in the interpersonal level.
So how much it changed the relationship between clinicians and patients, for example, and also between the patient and themselves.
This is a very interesting dichotomy that you have in the healthcare sector with a guy is that
you are dealing with simultaneously a very physical being and an entirely digital sphere.
And sometimes those two things do not actually match. And that chemical is on some and need to be aware of the other.
The other empathic you can see is group level impact, sectoral level impacts and set societal level.
So a group and societal level impacts might be where, for example,
that we have problems with the fact that if the NHS is grounded on this principle, that it is careful, all obvious.
It's like making that less true by focussing on on the introduction of.
When I should be used in a way that makes it more true.
But we could, in fact, introduce an new and evolving inequality and exacerbate those already existing.
And then the other thing I said to level and this is particularly important again, is taking a systems perspective,
is the issue with trust on how might you lose trust in the provision of health care from the states because you have made mistakes too early on?
Until there is all of the sort of levels that you might think about.
And then the other area that we need to try and look at is where you might have.
Different ethical issues arising at different levels of the machine learning pipeline.
One of the things I often say is if you have written ethics in to the business case that coded it out by the time it got to the point,
it's really clear example that we're currently tackling with us.
A couple of things is one is because the question of liability is a little bit unsure.
It tends to be interpreted that it land on the on the final clinician who's made the decision.
But all of. Tools that are deployed at the front line or deployed in the app stores are things like skin latex, for example,
which is an app that can take a photo of a mole and it will tell you your level of risk are skewed towards false
positives because it's less risk to the company to say that you have a diagnosis when you don't want to do it.
What's the issue that this is having is that whilst these technologies are
supposed to be deployed in order to to enable people to take care of themselves.
In fact, it is actually doing the opposite and driving people towards frontline care because people get these very high level ratings of risk.
Similarly, we have an issue with. Like breast cancer screening algorithms, for example,
that have drastically increase the capacity to recognise the potential of the pathology being that because can.
A machine can be many scans at once. But a doctor can still only treat one person at once.
So you effectively created a bottleneck, which is an ethical side from the perspective of that.
Then they have the person who is living with the potentially anxiety inducing diagnosis.
And that has very big implications for their medical integrity and that sort of mental integrity.
But be waiting much longer for treatment. So those are the kinds of areas that we try and look at.
I'm trying. Then develop standards and policies that build on the regulatory framework.
There is work going on to assess the regulation and the various things like create regulatory sandboxes in order to test ideas.
That takes a much longer than it takes to develop standards and policies and the implementation of them.
I'm sure one of the things, for example, that we have looked at is the code of conduct.
First of all, it is an abstraction of an abstraction. It's based on the ethical principles, but it is far more trying to operationalise them.
So instead of saying things like autonomy, it says things like design for your specific user state,
how the technology will impact them and how it will help and how it is better than what is already in place.
And there's a number of operational things that we have done to make that a little
bit more realistic because of the complexities that you're dealing with in medicine,
such as safety and efficacy.
For example, one of the things that we developed was the standards for evidence of efficacy in digital health technologies.
And similarly, what is socially acceptable commercial models for health pages.
And then to build a platform that shows how people can actually go in,
put provide that evidence to the entities of how you are meeting those principles.
What evidence have you provided and allow people to actually. This is all available in a big report.
That's and it was published a couple of weeks ago. Anyone wants to see really that's what we're trying to do.
Look at what are the issues to do with the fact that data is now circulating outside of the system to in many places,
you now have private companies that may know more about your health than the healthcare system
and that how does that breaking down traditional barriers that have been in good places?
We had earlier things like the difference between medical research and medical practise
when you're working in a cybernetic loop with data that starts to break down.
Look at the risks that approach at different levels of society,
different stages in the machine learning pipeline and how we actually operationalise those so that instead of just saying,
isn't it nice that everyone is going to be fat? How will we actually know?
Thank you very much, Jess. We're giving a little bit over the originally advertised time.
So anyone who needs to go do feel free. But we've got three questions from the audience that have attracted nine votes.
So I think it would be good to spend just a little bit of time addressing those.
One of them said, what place does diversity and inclusion play in work done in the ethics of a I?
What will the institute do to ensure a range of backgrounds and voices are involved?
That's a biggie. And I don't think this is the time to be discussing the various policies that the institute will be implementing.
But I'm going to take the opportunity to give a plug to the podcast Future Makers, where we have two excellent episodes last year.
One of them discussing the bias of algorithms, in fact, where Sandra and Brent were present and another one does A.I. have a gender?
And Charissa was a contributor to that. So in each case, you've got a discussion of 45, 50 minutes about these very difficult issues.
Future makers, Oxford. And you'll find it.
We had a Hulce series 10 podcasts on A.I. and ethical and other issues arising from A.I. But those those of you
who aren't to the other questions that I'm going to mention that might want to say a little bit about that issue.
So, Sandra, I think this is one aimed at you. What if I can make predictions that accurately predict predict risk?
For example, about credit, health, criminal behaviour, but are, in effect discriminatory?
Did you come to the front? Yeah. Many of our other speakers would like to do.
And you seem to be the obvious. Yes. That is could be all a very wet period.
It's for the record. Yeah, that's a very good question.
And it is one that I don't yet have an answer to.
And I think it is like the core question of what inspires my research in general,
which is it's not just about the question what's technically possible.
It's also about the question, is it ethical or desirable?
So just because we get very good at certain things doesn't necessarily mean we have to do them.
And I don't like the idea that the general idea of just because it's there, we should also use it.
I think we should actually have a very,
very thorough discussion of how we want to deploy those systems and if we actually want to welcome those in our society.
So when people talk about bias,
they often imagine that the problem is a system that's actually not very good at predicting things because it is biased by preconceptions.
You're saying even if the system really predicts very well, but actually.
Particular aspect to feeding into that decision that we'd rather didn't, right?
We may want to hold back on implementation. I think it's two different things.
I think there might be let's say there is a predictor that says the shape of your
nose is a very good predictor of whether you're going to fail in law school or not.
And I have statistical evidence that shows that. Right. And we know it's super accurate.
We could still think. I don't. I think that's stupid.
And I don't want my nose to have anything to do with whether or not I get admitted to Lorsque or not.
Right. And that it's not a technical problem.
That's a, you know, a question of what we think of what are desirable or socially acceptable criteria to make decisions based on rates.
Grades may be reference Thatchers maybe, but noses are not, even if they are good predictors.
The other thing would bias might be introduced is that we don't know what the shape of the nose actually correlates with.
Right. It might be that, you know. I don't know.
I women have particularly short noses and we don't know dad.
And all the sudden moves start discriminating against people, women.
And we don't know it because we don't have the link between gender and those as yet because we don't have enough research.
The only thing that we see is an interesting correlation between shape of noses and being successful in law school.
Right. So we have to be very, very careful when we choose does decision making tools and we don't know the actual causal link between those two,
which is related very much to your work on inscrutability of the machine, learning algorithms and all that's yapping.
You can't just take the results and use them without really understanding. Yes, I think that's that's the ethical change, the ethic of responsibility.
When we use big data for life changing decisions, then we should have a right to at least understand what's going on.
Respire, what's going on, or be honest about the fact we don't know what's going on and don't pretend to be,
you know, just trust him without actually questioning them. Thank you very much.
Another really big question here.
Do we foresee a time that A.I. will perform the work of ethics better than human intelligence based on our current definitions of AI and ethics?
Any volunteers may maybe your brain. Thank you.
That's an excellent question. I have a paper on that. I am very happy to to share, especially because I'm looking for feedback.
So if you show me any more, I will. But in a nutshell, I think that any entity that doesn't have the ability to feel pain and suffer and
feel pleasure and know what that is cannot possibly have any moral understanding.
Or so I argue. Right. So dot, dot, dot.
Read the map. Do any of our other speakers want to say anything about either of those big questions?
Can I say something about risk? Yeah. I mean, I find that question super interesting.
And it's one part of my interest in the ethics of prediction.
It seems to me at the moment there is a presumption that institutions have unlimited rights to assess risk and make decisions accordingly.
And I find that quite questionably questionable. So take insurance. Used to be the case that insurance was about pooling risk.
Right. So you got a big pool of people and you know that you have some notions of
statistics such that you know that some people are going to have health problems, other others won't.
And it balances itself out so that you can calculate how much you have to charge people to survive.
And now it seems like we can actually assess very, very accurately whether somebody is going to have a health problem or not.
And then if somebody is high risk, then you don't have to take them into insurance.
And it seems to me that there is this is a this is a process more in general, in society.
It's also in the job market and so on, in which it's not that risk is being diminished.
Overall, it's rather that it's being displaced. So the burden of risk is being pushed onto individuals.
And as individuals, we have much less resources to face some of these risks that maybe should be faced by society as a community.
So this is something that worries me. Thank you very much. Well.
I see, I see, I haven't done it yet. Very briefly, if you don't want to these question.
Yes, super short. Oh yeah. This would be a sliding the beginning of your.
What you can bring to this set of 30 exposed theological loop works of art of
those very much issues where machine learning and any I can tell at bones.
And how does that relate to your Arthur? Definitely, that's a very good point.
And you're right to push me on that.
And I think I can assist us in many things that can assist us in figuring out the empirical details, which may be very important for ethics.
But at the moment, as long as I is not sentenced, it's very questionable whether it can assess us in weighing that and making us decide.
In the end, how do how do we morally weigh these different things about bringing up these issues in matter?
This is my favourite philosopher. David Hume was fond of emphasising facts are one thing, but moral judgement arguably requires human sentiment.
On that note, let's thank all our speakers again.
This this has been quite an unusual seminar, but the main aim of it has been to let us all get to know each other,
to see some of the wonderful stuff that's going on around the university.
In subsequent seminars, we'll be digging more deeply.
It seems to me that this slide show technology is rather useful and in future will leave more time for questions and interaction.
Thank you very much for coming. Now onto the refreshments.
Thank you.