EGENIS seminar: "The Futility of AI Ethics" Dr Tyler Brunet (University of Exeter)
Egenis seminar series
Almost every predictable negative (unsafe or unjust) outcome of AI development has occurred. Ethical intervention on AI seems futile. We attribute this futility to two primary factors: discordance and the unique ontological characteristics of AI. By discordance we mean a conflict between ethical restrictions and potential uses of a technology.
| An Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences seminar | |
|---|---|
| Date | 10 February 2025 |
| Time | 15:30 to 17:00 |
| Place | Hybrid |
Event details
This incentivize some to exploit unregulated potential, creating an arms race between positive usage and unrestricted maximization of AI’s benefits. However, discordance alone is insufficient to explain this futility. Nuclear and biotechnologies also generate discordance, but have been subject to very successful ethical interventions; we argue that the unique ontology of AI makes regulation exceptionally difficult. The characteristics of AI that we believe are most relevant are: (1) high resource accessibility (hardware are inexpensive, legal and ubiquitous), (2) epistemic shallowness (low technical barriers to entry), and (3) proliferation potential (ease of replication and dissemination). By disanalogy with nuclear and biotechnology, we argue for the relevance of these features to explaining the difficulty of ethically motivated interventions on AI.
Venue: Byrne House (spaces limited)
Virtual: via Zoom
