Ethics for AI Workshop, IJCAI-16, July 2016, New York

ETHICS FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Future of Life Institute generously provided us with additional funds towards this workshop. This enabled us to give bursaries to some who would not otherwise have been able to attend, and greatly helped the success of the day.

This workshop ran immediately prior to the main 25th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI-16

Abstracts are available here.

A paper presented by Paula Boddington with work from this project can be found here.

Workshop date: Saturday 9th July. Workshop number: 06

Recent progress in various subfields of AI has caused some researchers and pundits to raise concerns about the dangers that AI might ultimately pose. These concerns range from questions about the ethics of delegating to military drones the authority to decide when to attack human targets, up to fears about a possible existential risk posed by AI technologies, should “superintelligence” ever become a reality. Much of the debate surrounding these issues has taken place in a scientific vacuum, uninformed by the experiences and insights of practicing AI researchers. Meanwhile, a wide range of other and sometimes less obvious ethical issues arise from current and proposed use of AI in diverse areas such as medicine, social care, autonomous trading agents and autonomous vehicles.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together, in a structured setting, AI researchers and others interested in understanding how the discipline of AI should respond to these concerns. The workshop particularly aims to foster an active exchange of ideas between attendees from different disciplinary backgrounds to gain a better understanding of the ethical issues surrounding AI.

8.30 WORKSHOP START

8.30 Robert Wortham, Andreas Theodorou and Joanna Bryson     What is my Robot Thinking? : Transparency as a Fundamental Design Requirement for AI Architectures           

9.10     Michael Wellman and Uday Rajan     Ethical Issues for Autonomous Trading Agents (Discussion Paper) 

9.50 Ugo Pagallo     When Morals Ain’t Enough: Robots, Ethics, and the Rules of the Law  

10.30 – 11.00 REFRESHMENT BREAK

11.00

11.00 Kay Firth-Butterfield     Today’s Law, Tomorrow’s Consequences

11.15 Paula Boddington     The distinctiveness of AI ethics

11.50 Francesca Rossi     Moral Preferences                                          

12.30 – 1.30 LUNCH BREAK

1.30 Deborah G. Johnson and Mario Verdicchio    Reframing AI Discourse  

2.10 Toby Walsh     The Singularity May Never Be Near  

2.50 Nate Soares     The Value Learning Problem      

3.30 – 4.00 REFRESHMENT BREAK

4.00 – 5.30

4.00 Federico Pistono and Roman Yampolskiy     Unethical Research: How to Create a Malevolent Artificial Intelligence  

4.40 Wolfhart Totschnig     The Problem of Superintelligence: Political, not Technological  

5.20 CLOSING REMARKS

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Michael Wooldridge, Oxford University

Peter Millican, Oxford University

Christopher Megone,  Leeds University

Paula Boddington, Oxford University

PRIMARY CONTACT paula.boddington@cs.ox.ac.uk

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Joanna Bryson,  University of Bath

Vincent Conitzer, Duke University

Michael Fisher, Liverpool University

Brian Logan, Nottingham University

Francesca Rossi, University of Padova

Stuart Russell, University of California at Berkeley

Bart Selman, Cornell University

Mariarosaria Taddeo,  University of Oxford

Cecilia Tilli, University of Oxford

Michael Wellman, University of Michigan