So you, Harrison, is based within the equity philosophy and is devoted to to doing research and practical or applied ethics. As the name suggests, it's directed by June seven, me August the chair in practical ethics and currently includes 24 other academic staff members, as well as five don't think students.
Now we have a very broad remit, which is basically just to bring philosophical analysis to bear on practically important ethical questions and questions about how we want to live, how society ought to be arranged and so on. And as you might suspect, given that broad agreement, we work on a fairly diverse range of topics, some of which are listed on the site. Historically, we've had quite a strong focus on ethical issues raised by medicine and the life sciences.
But we've also worked in other areas like criminal justice, criminal justice, ethics, internet ethics and military efforts. OK, so, so several of our projects bring philosophy to bear on Christians and ethics, and what I want to do in that in the few minutes that I have left is just to briefly mentioned some of these. I went there to cover all of them just by way of illustration.
Some of the ways in which rethink some of the areas in which rethink philosophical ethics might have something to say about ethics. And then Garissa is going to go into a bit more detail about exactly how philosophy can contribute to debates about ethics.
OK, so the first strand of research that I wanted to mention is the work that Julian Savea, Eskew and Guy Canning are doing, along with actress Ginger from Melbourne University on the role of public preferences and informing the development of ethical algorithms.
So as you're probably all aware, one of the challenges posed by, for example, autonomous vehicles is is that a specifying how these vehicles should respond when posed with like ethical dilemmas and a choice between sacrificing an occupant of the vehicle and sacrificing a pedestrian,
a choice between running over an adult or running over a child? So one natural response to this problem has been to kind of go out into the world and collect lots of data about what the public think about how autonomous vehicle, we should respond to these kinds of situations and actually quite a lot of that work has already been done.
But what's what's not in all of this is what we should be doing with the data that we're getting out of this empirical research, essentially scientific data about what public the public preferences actually are. Because it certainly doesn't seem to be the case that we should just kind of unthinkingly implement the public well in this kind of area. So I suppose in a particular society that most people thought that autonomous vehicles should prioritise saving the lives of white people over others.
Clearly, you wouldn't follow that. That's what we should programme. Autonomous vehicles to do. But on the other hand, it does seem plausible that at least some public attitudes should play some role in informing the design of these algorithms. As in what Gillian, Guy and Chris are thinking about is exactly what that role should be.
And just to kind of cut straight to one of their conclusions, one of the proposals probably the most controversial proposal has been that public preferences should be put through a kind of philosophical crusade before being built into algorithms.
So we should first check with these preferences are actually consistent with at least some plausible and widely held philosophical or ethical theories and only preferences to make it through this kind of filter in what they call laundered preferences and should be fed into algorithm design. OK, so the second strand of our research that I wanted to mention is a programme that I'm leading on the ethics of predicting and influencing behaviour supported by the Wellcome Trust in the U.S.
So this work has intersected with ethics in a few places. One of these is on the topic of crime prediction, where we've been doing some work with colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry to try to make some, I guess, practical suggestions about how we could improve the kinds of crime prediction algorithms that are increasingly being used based in criminal justice and in forensic psychiatrist.
And by improve, I mean here making more accurate but also mitigating some of the ethical concerns about bias and unfairness and potentially the strand of our research that I wanted to go into a little bit more detail about is some work that we're doing on the idea of a right to mental integrity because I think this is an interesting case of an area where an existing thinking in medical ethics might have something of relevance to contribute to to AI ethics.
So it's very widely accepted, especially in medical ethics, but also elsewhere, that we all possess something like a right to bodily integrity or right against interference with our bodies. This right would be infringed if someone physically assaults you. But it would also be infringed, for example, if a medical professional performed a medical procedure on you without your consent.
So the question that we're interested in is whether there might be an analogous right to mental integrity, so that would be a right against interference with your mind and your body. And I mean, this is a question that hasn't been much discussed either in philosophy or law, but we think it's going to be very relevant to medical ethics because quite a few medical interventions look like they might infringe something like a right to mental integrity.
Perhaps the most obvious example here would be the use of compulsory psychiatric interventions on patients who have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But we think this question about mental integrity is also going to be relevant to non-medical interventions and interventions that are not at all physically invasive. And I think one of the most interesting and important examples here would be what we might call assisted manipulation.
So I suppose that an online platforms that something like Facebook develops and deploys an artificial intelligence that can identify the psychological weaknesses of all of its users and almost perfectly target them with with content that will maximise the length of time that they spend on the platform and sort of maximally strengthen their desire to keep habitually checking that platform.
It seems reasonable to ask whether we could think of this technology as infringing a rights to mental integrity, and we think that the answer to this question is going to depend on exactly how you understand that, right? And what kind of sense of basis you think that it has released on some plausible accounts of the right to mental integrity that we're considering.
It seems that that air based manipulation could actually infringe the right to mental integrity in just the same way as, for example, compulsory psychiatric interventions, which might suggest that we should be regulating air based manipulation and other similar forms of manipulation much more stringently, perhaps a bit more closely to how we currently regulate psychiatry.
The third and final example that I wanted to say something about is the work of an amazing man, Steven Rainey, on ethical issues raised by the use of neuro prosthetics for decoding speech. So this is this is the philosophical part of a large multidisciplinary project called Brain Con, which is which is seeking to develop neuro prostheses, a brain computer interface that could allow individuals who have lost the ability to speak to communicate.
So these devices would work by by detecting brain signals, converting them into synthesised speech with the mediation of an air language model. And that language model would do a significant amount of predicting and rephrasing in order to allow the speaker to speak in a kind of ordinary conversational pace.
And with more or less ordinary fluency. So one of the ethical issues here concerns the extent to which we could hold people responsible for the utterances that they might make via a device like this. So ordinarily, we do hold people responsible for their speech acts if someone says something racist or offensive. We tend to think that they can be blamed for that. And that seems to presuppose that they're responsible for what they've said.
If I promise to do something, you'll probably think that I'm bound by that promise. And again, that seems to presuppose that I'm responsible for what I said when I made the promise. But one question is, to what extent would those kinds of responsibility assignments carry over to cases involving new prostheses of this sort?
Given that in these cases, it might be a much more significant gap between the kind of mental act of intending or attempting to say something and the actual utterance that gets produced. So how does the mediation of an artificial intelligence in this kind of system affect the responsibility of the speaker for the utterance? And how might the nature of AI make a difference through assignments response? But these are the kinds of questions that Stephen and NRA are addressing.
And again, just kind of briefly cut to one of the conclusions. They're arguing that in many of these cases, the mediation of the artificial intelligence could significantly diminish the responsibility of the speaker and in a way that might require this sort of significant. Do you think some of our ethical norms regarding speech and conversation? OK, so those are some of the air relevant areas on which you have AI Centre is working.
There are others as well. And Mike Robillard, a lot of military ethicists in the centre, has been working on critiquing some of the existing debates about autonomous weapons systems or killer robots. And one of the students, Abhishek Mishra, is working on the extent to which we might need to revise some of our concepts, like the standard of care and medical negligence in a world in which health care professionals are relying heavily on machine learning classifiers.
But I'm going to stop there and handover to accuracy, and he's going to go into a bit more detail about some of the the actual ways in which philosophy can kind of make progress on the types of topics that I've been talking about. And also to tell you about some of the research.