Ethical Machines

My guest, Mona Sloane, author of Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life, argues that AI has become part of our social infrastructure. Its predictive systems increasingly shape how we work, find information, build relationships, and navigate society.
Mona worries that as prediction becomes embedded in more areas of life, we risk becoming less willing to deliberate, challenge assumptions, and shape our own futures. I push back on whether AI really should be understood as infrastructure and whether predictions made by AI are fundamentally different from the predictions humans have always made.
We also discuss democracy, power, regulation, and what happens when prediction becomes the dominant way of understanding the world.
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Science depends on more than just results. It depends on researchers asking questions, testing hypotheses, challenging assumptions, and scrutinizing evidence.
My guest, Emily Sullivan, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Science and AI at the University of Edinburgh, argues that AI is beginning to influence every stage of the scientific process—from deciding which questions get asked to how papers are written, reviewed, and published.
We discuss algorithmic monocultures, scientific de-skilling, AI-generated research, and whether the pressure to accelerate discovery risks undermining the very process that makes science reliable in the first place.
I'm sympathetic to the promise of AI in science. Emily is concerned that, if we're not careful, we may end up optimizing for scientific output at the expense of scientific inquiry itself.

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My guest, Fabio Tollon, a postdoctoral researcher on the BRAID programme at the University of Edinburgh, argues that answering that question is more difficult than it first appears. Traditional theories of moral responsibility suggest that people should only be blamed for actions they understand and control. But AI systems seem to challenge both requirements.
We discuss responsibility gaps, the problem of many hands, whether AI developers are more like parents or engineers, and Fabio's distinction between moral responsibility and moral answerability. Along the way, we explore whether answerability can help us make sense of AI harms when blame is difficult to assign.

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Aligning an AI traditionally looks like a matter of giving it rules to obey. But my guest, Gillian Hadfield, Professor of AI Alignment and Governance at Johns Hopkins University, thinks that’s the wrong approach. She argues that we need to think about what it means to have a normative capacity - an ability to categorize behavior as (un)acceptable in a given context by observing that context - and then think about what it would mean to give that capacity to an AI. Lots to dig into here, including especially our disagreement about whether she’s focused on an ethical normative capacity vs. a prudential normative capacity.

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Technologist’s are racing to create AGI, artificial general intelligence. They also say we must align the AGI’s moral values with our own. But Professors Ariela Tubert and Justin Tiehen argue that’s impossible. Once you create an AGI, they say, you also give them the intellectual capacity needed for freedom, including the freedom to reject your given values. Originally aired in season 2.

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