In this talk, Professor David Williamson Shaffer looks at what AI is (and isn’t), its impact on what and how we learn, and how AI can change what it means to do research.
We invite you to join us in celebrating the publication of Environmental Ethics and Medical Reproduction by Dr Cristina Richie.
Join us for a ‘fireside chat’ where we bring together experts in AI to address questions surrounding the framing of responsibility for AI & autonomous systems.
Join us for our Flagship Lecture, where you'll hear from Dr Michael Veale on how to understand and address challenges of power and justice that stem from digital technologies.
As AI's influence grows, navigating its geopolitics becomes increasingly crucial for shaping the future of nations and their global relationships.
Event cancelled
Technomoral Conversations is a “fireside chat” event focused on intimate relationships with and through machines. Can a person have a deeply meaningful relationship with a robot or AI chatbot? Could an app help enrich and support your relationship with your life partner? How are our feelings and interactions affected when there is a machine mediating between ourselves and a person we care about and/or for? This conversation will explore how we can navigate the complexities of technologies that are entangled with our relationships and our emotions.
Professor Jacqui Gabb, Chief Relationships Officer at Paired
Jacqui Gabb is professor of Sociology and Intimacy at The Open University. She has completed externally-funded research on couple relationships, sex, intimacy and sexuality, and relationships and sex education (RSE). Building upon her award-winning Enduring Love? study, she worked with a start-up tech company to develop Paired, which is now the global #1 couple relationship app. Her current research is pioneering conceptual tools to examine contemporary relationship quality and digital intimacies.
Kate Darling, Author and Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab
Dr. Kate Darling is a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab and author of The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots. Kate’s work looks at the near-term effects of robotic technology, with a particular interest in law, social, and ethical issues. She runs experiments, holds workshops, writes, and speaks about some of the more interesting developments in the world of human-robot interaction, and where we might find ourselves in the future.
Professor Andrew McStay, Professor of Technology & Society and Director of the Emotional AI Lab at Bangor University
Andrew McStay is Professor of Technology & Society at Bangor University, UK. His most recent book ‘Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods’ (Springer 2022) examines the impact of technologies that make use of data about affective and emotional life on politics. His forthcoming book ‘Automating Empathy’ (OUP 2023) considers systems that pertain to feel-into everyday life. His latest papers have considered ethics, artificial personalities and Metaverse developments. Director of Emotional AI Lab, current projects include cross-cultural social analysis of emotional AI in UK and Japan, biometrics and policing, children and emotoys, and work with the Welsh Government on data ethics in public services. Non-academic work includes IEEE membership of various IEEE groups (P7000, 7030, 7700), W3C on interoperability in the Metaverse, and ongoing advising roles for start-ups, NGOs and UK policy bodies.
Professor Shannon Vallor (Chair), Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures
Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy. Professor Vallor's research explores how new technologies, especially AI, robotics, and data science, reshape human moral character, habits, and practices. Her work includes advising policymakers and industry on the ethical design and use of AI. She is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, and currently chairs Scotland's Data Delivery Group.
Please note this is a hybrid event. Streaming will be live captioned.
Pegasus is widely regarded as the most effective and sought-after cyber-surveillance system on the market. The system’s creator, the NSO Group, a private corporation headquartered in Israel, is not shy about proclaiming its ability to thwart terrorists and criminals.
But the Pegasus system has also been used to spy on hundreds, and maybe thousands, of innocent people around the world: heads of state, diplomats, human rights defenders, political opponents, and journalists. This spyware is as insidious as it is invasive, capable of infecting a private cell phone without alerting the owner, and of doing its work in the background, in silence, virtually undetectable. Pegasus can track a person’s daily movement in real time, gain control of the device’s microphones and cameras at will, and capture all videos, photos, emails, texts, and passwords – encrypted or not. This data can be exfiltrated, stored on outside servers, and then leveraged to blackmail, intimidate, and silence people.
Join us for a conversation with the authors of Pegasus: How a Spy in Our Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy. Meticulously reported and masterfully written, Pegasus shines a light on the lives that have been turned upside down by this unprecedented threat and exposes the chilling new ways authoritarian regimes are eroding key pillars of democracy: privacy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech.
Laurent Richard is a journalist, executive producer of investigative documentaries and the founder and director of Forbidden Stories, a consortium of journalists that was awarded the 2019 European Press Prize and the 2021 George Polk Awards in Journalism for its work continuing the investigations of threatened reporters. He was named “European Journalist of the Year” at the Prix Europa in Berlin in 2018. He is the co-author with Sandrine Rigaud of the book Pegasus.
Sandrine Rigaud is a French investigative journalist and is the editor-in-chief of Forbidden Stories. As editor of Forbidden Stories since 2019, she coordinated the “Pegasus Project” published in July 2021 and the “Cartel Project,” a massive cross-border collaboration to finish the investigations of Regina Martinez, a Mexican journalist murdered in 2012, that won a George Polk Award and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize. She is the co-author with Laurent Richard of the book Pegasus.
Gina Helfrich (chair) is Baillie Gifford Programme Manager within the Centre for Technomoral Futures. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Previously, she held roles in programme management and communications in the nonprofit technology sector. Dr. Helfrich leads on strategy for the Centre in collaboration with Professor Vallor.
Please note this is a hybrid event. Streaming will be live captioned.
Join Dr Gina Helfrich, from the Centre for Technomoral Futures, Alex Velinov, CTO at Tag Digital, and The Data Lab's Dr Alfred Tiley as we discuss - 'ChatGPT: Next Big Thing Or Passing Trend?'
Given the enormous advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), many believe humanity is on the threshold of the most profound technological revolution it has ever witnessed. AI already affects our everyday lives, and our hopes and anxieties around AI run high. Some predict that further development of AI will put us on a path to human extinction while others believe it will usher in a new era of compassion, non-violence, and prosperity.
Against a background of unrelenting cultural and geopolitical tensions, looming planetary catastrophes, and big challenges in global health, justice, and democracy, will AI turn out to be yet another existential risk? Or will it help us address the major challenges of our times?
In this Futures Conversations event, we bring together leading experts from the worlds of science, politics, and civil society to debate what our AI futures may bring, and to develop ideas for what is needed to advance our collective ability to put AI to the best possible use. The conversation will build on a series of workshops where different visions of our AI future were explored, and which had a specific emphasis on hearing the voices of people and communities that are traditionally underrepresented in these debates.
Against the ideas developed in these workshops, we will discuss questions such as, who will determine our AI future, how AI and humanity can evolve alongside each other, what being human in an AI world will mean, and how AI-driven economies and societies will work. Rather than providing principles for what AI itself “should be like”, we aim to evolve into what we desire an “AI-ready” society could look like, and into new ideas for how we might build this future.
Petra Molnar, Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab ( York University) and head of the Migration and Technology Monitor, a multilingual archive of work interrogating technological experiments on people crossing borders, funded by the Open Society Foundations.
Professor Kate Crawford, Research Professor (USC Annenberg, Los Angeles), Senior Principal Researcher (Microsoft Research Lab, NYC), Honorary Professor (University of Sydney), and inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice (École Normale Supérieure, Paris).
Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI and the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public (Universiry of California, Berkeley).
Pascale Fung, Chair Professor at the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering (The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST)).
William Isaac, Staff Research Scientist (DeepMind), Advisory Board Member (Human Rights Data Analysis Group), and Research Affiliate (Oxford University Centre for the Governance of AI)
Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence & Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures (University of Edinburgh).
Michael Rovatsos (Chair), Professor of Artificial Intelligence (University of Edinburgh), and head of the Bayes Centre, the University’s Data Science and AI innovation hub.
Please note this is a hybrid event. Streaming will be live captioned.
This talk discusses how “deep” knowledge can systematically be to generate new information and inform policy space for sustainable and healthy future.
Join us for a conversation on sustainability and AI, featuring a panel of experts who are tackling different facets of this challenge.
Join us for a free and open to all (subject to room capacity) lecture by Abeba Birhane on "The Limits of Fairness" in AI ethics. This is an in-person event.
In this lecture, Professor Karen Yeung sketches out the content and contours of a deliberately over-simplified contemporary fairytale which she refers to as the ‘Digital Enchantment’.
Join us on the 29th of March for a conversation on the future of Responsible AI between two leading voices in Europe and Scotland.
The first event in the Technomoral Conversations series - join us to explore the Ethics of Large Language Models.
The one-day conference brings world-renowned scientists, artists, leaders, and change-makers into live conversations to draw out their expertise in realising change.
An evening of conversation about how technical and moral intelligence can be brought together to lead us out of crisis and into hope.
