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Show Notes

As technically challenging as it may be to develop safe and beneficial AI, this challenge also raises some thorny questions regarding ethics and morality, which are just as important to address before AI is too advanced. How do we teach machines to be moral when people can't even agree on what moral behavior is? And how do we help people deal with and benefit from the tremendous disruptive change that we anticipate from AI?

To help consider these questions, Joshua Greene and Iyad Rawhan kindly agreed to join the podcast. Josh is a professor of psychology and member of the Center for Brain Science Faculty at Harvard University, where his lab has used behavioral and neuroscientific methods to study moral judgment, focusing on the interplay between emotion and reason in moral dilemmas. He’s the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them. Iyad is the AT&T Career Development Professor and an associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Scalable Cooperation group. He created the Moral Machine, which is “a platform for gathering human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence.”

In this episode, we discuss the trolley problem with autonomous cars, how automation will affect rural areas more than cities, how we can address potential inequality issues AI may bring about, and a new way to write ghost stories.

This transcript has been heavily edited for brevity. You can read the full conversation here.