HMI Project Public Lecture at ANU: Humanised machines and mechanised humans: Challenges & opportunities
Professor David Danks
L.L. Thurstone Professor of Philosophy & Psychology Head, Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University
Much of the conversation about intelligent machines centers on those that function independently of people, whether self-driving cars, autonomous weapons, home healthcare robots, or many other innovations. But as technology plays an ever-larger role in our lives, we also must consider the ways in which human-machine teaming is rapidly becoming the norm: the line between us and the machines that we use is increasingly blurry. I will explore the distinctive challenges and opportunities that arise at this interface, ranging from biases that result from the interaction of machine and human decision-making, to strategies for developing machine intelligence that can be trusted.
Professor David Danks is the L.L. Thurstone Professor of Philosophy & Psychology, and Head of the Department of Philosophy, at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA, USA), where he also co-directs the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity (IDeaS) and is the Chief Ethicist of the Block Center for Technology & Society.
The Humanising Machine Intelligence Grand Challenge
Every new technology bears its designers’ stamp. For Machine Intelligence, our values are etched deep in the code. Machine Intelligence sees the world through the data that we provide and curate. Its choices reflect our priorities. Its unintended consequences voice our indifference. It cannot be morally neutral. We have a choice: try to design morally defensible machine intelligence, which sees the world fairly and chooses justly; or else build the next industrial revolution on immoral machines.
To design morally defensible machine intelligence, we must understand how our perspectives reflect power and prejudice. We must understand our priorities, and how to represent them in terms a machine can act on. And we must break new ground in machine learning and AI research.
The HMI project unites some of the Australian National University’s world-leading researchers in the social sciences, philosophy, and computer science around these shared goals. It is an ANU Grand Challenge. You can read more about it here: hmi.anu.edu.au.
Artwork by Janusz Jurek: www.januszjurek.info CC 4.0 licence
