Lecture Slides

In recent years, any number of universities have built bridges between computer science and ethics. Students whose future careers involve designing AIs, the thought is, should learn some basic ideas in ethics. Research done at the ValuesLab questions this widely held view. In a slogan, AI needs philosophy, not “only” ethics. Why? Ethics certainly has a role to play in the training of future AI designers. Many of the key questions, however, are studied elsewhere. Here are some examples. Can AIs think? Do they have beliefs, intentions, agency? The relevant notions here are studied in the philosophy of mind. What makes AIs explainable? Understanding, explanation, and justification are topics in epistemology. What makes an AI model unfair? Here it matters how we conceive of causation and counterfactuals, key notions in metaphysics and the philosophy of science. And insofar as LLMs are based on language, research on AI involves any number of themes from the philosophy of language. The list goes on. The upshot is that core questions in major subfields of philosophy bear directly on challenges in AI.