Research
Areas for research that we are working on, or interested in, include:
Ethics of AI
- Moral status of AI-systems, artificial moral agency
- The alignment problem
- Machine ethics (possibility, role of virtue ethics, rules, …)
- Superintelligence and XRisk (assumptions, prediction, policy, …)
- Risks and Chances of AI in society (labor market, legal system, intellectual property rights, monopolies, fair distribution of gains, ecology … vs. better decisions, large data insights, …)
- AI and responsibility allocation (responsibility gaps)
- Bias in decision systems
- Specific risks from large language models and other large ML systems
- Surveillance, esp. new forms (brain surveillance, deep analysis, …)
- Human dependence on AI, manipulation of humans, loss (or change) of humanity
- Can or should progress in AI be stopped or slowed down?
- Ethical recommendations for regulations of AI
- Political & societal structures to control AI development and use
Theoretical Philosophy and AI
- Artificial sentience, role of consciousness in cognition
- Models of natural cognition and AI
- Notion of computation
- Notion of intelligence
- Role of normative cognition in intelligence
- Normative approaches in AI evaluation, training, and reward (limits of rational choice, Markovian reward, etc.)
- Normative approaches to AI interpretation problems (opacity, explainable AI)
- Philosophy through AI (esp. philosophy of mind, language, epistemology)
- Role of representation in AI (esp. concepts & language)
- Use of AI in scientific research (e.g. neuroscience, medicine, …)
- The limits of ML, relation of the to scaling of models
- Embodied cognition and AI
- Perception and the predictive mind
See the activities on http://sophia.de/research.htm