IDEA Pod new episode: What's wrong with formalising ethics for AI?

Graham Bex-Priestley talks to Christian Herzog (Institute for Electrical Engineering in Medicine, University of Lübeck) about the problems of formalising ethics within artificial intelligence.

What seems at first to be a merely technical issue ends up touching on the contentious topics of inclusive deliberation, moral understanding, relationships of power, and the ideals of democracy.

Is there anything wrong with an AI using "deep learning" to essentially trawl the internet and aggregate the moral opinions they find? Christian bounces off Foucault and Habermas to explain what he thinks is missing from such approaches to machine ethics.

Released 11 May 2020. Presented by Graham Bex-Priestley.

Download Season 2: Episode 8 (MP3)

Listen to previous episodes of The IDEA Pod

Bibliography

Christian recently completed an MA in Applied and Professional Ethics at the IDEA Centre and published two papers based on his research for this course:

Herzog, C. On formal ethics versus inclusive moral deliberation. AI Ethics (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00045-4 

Herzog, C. Three Risks That Caution Against a Premature Implementation of Artificial Moral Agents for Practical and Economical Use. Sci Eng Ethics 27, 3 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00283-z