Ravit Dotan, PhD asserts that beneficial AI adoption requires clarity of purpose, good judgment, ethical leadership, and making responsibility integral to innovation.

Ravit and Kimberly discuss the philosophy of science; why all algorithms incorporate values; how technical judgements centralize power; not exempting AI from established norms; when lists of risks lead us astray; wasting water, eating meat, and using AI responsibly; corporate ethics washing; patterns of ethical decoupling; reframing the relationship between responsibility and innovation; measuring what matters; and the next phase of ethical innovation in practice.

Ravit Dotan, PhD is an AI ethics researcher and governance advisor on a mission to enable everyone to adopt AI the right way. The Founder and CEO of TechBetter, Ravit holds a PhD in Philosophy from UC Berkeley and is a sought-after advisor on the topic of responsible innovation.

Related Resources

• The AI Treasure Chest (Substack): https://techbetter.substack.com/
• The Values Embedded in Machine Learning Research (Paper): https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3531146.3533083

A transcript of this episode is here.

Dr. Ash Watson studies how stories ranging from classic Sci-Fi to modern tales invoking moral imperatives, dystopian futures and economic logic shape our views of AI.

Ash and Kimberly discuss the influence of old Sci-Fi on modern tech; why we can’t escape the stories we’re told; how technology shapes society; acting in ways a machine will understand; why the language we use matters; value transference from humans to AI systems; the promise of AI’s promise; grounding AI discourse in material realities; moral imperatives and capitalizing on crises; economic investment as social logic; AI’s claims to innovation; who innovation is really for; and positive developments in co-design and participatory research.

Dr. Ash Watson is a Scientia Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Social Research in Health at UNSW Sydney. She is also an Affiliate of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (CADMS).

Related Resources:

• Ash Watson (Website): https://awtsn.com/
• The promise of artificial intelligence in health: Portrayals of emerging healthcare technologies (Article): https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13840
• An imperative to innovate? Crisis in the sociotechnical imaginary (Article): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2024.102229

A transcript of this episode is here.

Robert Mahari examines the consequences of addictive intelligence, adaptive responses to regulating AI companions, and the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Robert and Kimberly discuss the attributes of addictive products; the allure of AI companions; AI as a prescription for loneliness; not assuming only the lonely are susceptible; regulatory constraints and gaps; individual rights and societal harms; adaptive guardrails and regulation by design; agentic self-awareness; why uncertainty doesn’t negate accountability; AI’s negative impact on the data commons; economic disincentives; interdisciplinary collaboration and future research.

Robert Mahari is a JD-PhD researcher at MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Law School where he studies the intersection of technology, law and business. In addition to computational law, Robert has a keen interest in AI regulation and embedding regulatory objectives and guardrails into AI designs.

A transcript of this episode is here.

Additional Resources:

• The Allure of Addictive Intelligence (article): https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/05/1095600/we-need-to-prepare-for-addictive-intelligence/
• Robert Mahari (website): https://robertmahari.com/