Philosophers Appointed To High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence
The European Commission (EC), which proposes and administers European Union (EU) law and policy, has created a new High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, the aim of which is to advise on the crafting and implementation of the EU’s strategy on artificial intelligence.
Among the 52 experts are several people who work in philosophy. They are:
- Mark Coeckelbergh, Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Vienna
- Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford
- Eric Hilgendorf, Professor of criminal law, criminal procedure and legal philosophy at the University of Würzburg
- Thomas Metzinger, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
- Aimee van Wynsberghe, Assistant Professor in Ethics and Technology, TU Delft
The tasks of the group, according to the EC, are:
- Advise the Commission on next steps addressing AI-related mid to long-term challenges and opportunities through recommendations which will feed into the policy development process, the legislative evaluation process and the development of a next-generation digital strategy.
- Propose to the Commission draft AI ethics guidelines, covering issues such as fairness, safety, transparency, the future of work, democracy and more broadly the impact on the application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, including privacy and personal data protection, dignity, consumer protection and non-discrimination
- Support the Commission on further engagement and outreach mechanisms to interact with a broader set of stakeholders in the context of the AI Alliance, share information and gather their input on the group’s and the Commission’s work.
You can read more about the group here.
Good initiative and I’m looking forward to see how this group will influence policies. A question: why not include in the list those members of the Expert Group who specialise in ethics? Do they not “work in philosophy”?
Thanks for this question. I went back over the list and added Aimee van Wynsberghe, who I ought to have included originally—my apologies. I meant to mention anyone with a faculty appointment in a philosophy department, or who is a graduate student in a philosophy department, or whose academic journal publications are mostly in philosophy journals. DN is primarily, as its tagline says, “news for and about the philosophy profession,” and while of course I know it is up for debate how to delimit “philosophy profession” and that there will be ambiguous and anomalous cases, the foregoing characterization tends to work pretty well.
Aimee van Wynsberghe was the one who initially made me wonder about the underlying rationale for inclusion. I understand the inherent fuzzy-ness of such delineations in practice, but I think its good to include her in the list. Thanks for the quick reply!