This is the in-person registration option for the august 12 session!

How Can We Build Human Morality Into AI?

NOTE: This session will take place from 9:00 AM until 12:00 PM.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now being used to make many lifechanging decisions in medicine, law, transportation, the military, business, and other areas. Critics object that using AI in these areas is inhumane and too likely to lead to harm, unfairness, and other moral wrongs. I will admit these dangers but reply that these decisions can be made safer and more ethical by building human moral values into the AI decisionmaker. Our team does this by surveying human moral judgments at two levels and then correcting for ignorance, confusion, and partiality. To show how our methods work in practice, I will demonstrate our websites, report initial empirical findings for kidney allocation and dementia, and finally discuss potential future applications to criminal law, transportation, business, and the military.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Chauncey Stillman Distinguished Professor of Practical Ethics, Duke University

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and attended the Hotchkiss School, Amherst College (BA 1977), and Yale University (PhD 1982). He taught at Dartmouth College 1981-2009 and at Duke University since 2010.

Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Distinguished Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University with secondary appointments in Duke’s Law School and Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. He has served as co-chair of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association.

Sinnott-Armstrong has published eight books, 21 edited collections, and over 250 articles and chapters in leading venues, including top journals in psychology, law, and philosophy. His research has addressed a wide variety of central issues in applied ethics, empirical moral psychology and neuroscience, epistemology, informal logic, and philosophy of law, religion, and psychiatry. His current focus is on moral artificial intelligence, political polarization, and various topics in moral psychology and brain science, including free will, consciousness, and moral responsibility. His popular trade books include Morality Without God?, Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, and Moral AI and How We Get There (with Jana Schaich Borg and Vincent Conitzer).

Sinnott-Armstrong co-teaches a Massive Open Online Course, Think Again, on the Coursera platform with over a million students registered. He co-directs Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy, which trains philosophers in neuroscience and neuroscientists in philosophy. He is widely sought as a speaker on a wide variety of topics to both academic and public audiences.