In this Annual London Lecture, Professor Quassim Cassam explores novel forms of extremism whose purpose is not to advance a political cause and examines the implications of this for the legal definition of terrorism.

Can there be moral progress? Some optimists would argue that there can, because there already has been, with fewer people living in poverty, and corporal punishment now a rarity. But do optimists confuse material progress with moral progress? Is their story too Eurocentric? If there is less poverty but more inequality or less community, how do we take the overall balance? And if moral standards themselves change along with other changes, how are we to gain the perspective we need in order to arrive at an answer? These and other related questions will be addressed by our panel of experts.

Our panellists are Professor Edward Harcourt (University of Oxford), Professor Allen Buchanan (Duke University), and Professor Julia Hermann (University of Twente). The discussion will be chaired by Ritula Shah.

Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence have generated a lot of public anxiety, especially regarding ethical issues: data bias, privacy, the opacity of automated decisions, the effects of algorithmic bubbles on democratic debate, not to mention the harms caused by deep fakes – the list goes on. In response, the emerging field of AI ethics aspires to address these issues.

The expert panel of this year's Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Symposium, chaired by award-winning journalist Ritula Shah (formerly at the BBC), discuss these issues and more, thinking of ways we might address them.

The Panel:
Mark Coeckelbergh, Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Philosophy of Department of the University of Vienna.

Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy.

Linda Eggert, Early Career Research Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy, at Balliol College, and the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford.

Allan Dafoe is a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind leading work on Frontier Safety and Governance.

Ritula Shah (chair) is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. She is the presenter of ‘Calm Classics’ every weekday evening on ClassicFM. Ritula left the BBC in April 2023, after a career spanning almost 35 years.

Find out more about the panel here: https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/event/is-ethical-ai-a-fantasy/