William MacAskill: Effective Altruism

Forthcoming in The Norton Introduction to Ethics

Other papers

AI alignment vs AI ethical treatment: Ten challenges – Adam Bradley (Lingnan University) and Bradford Saad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

A morally acceptable course of AI development should avoid two dangers: creating unaligned AI systems that pose a threat to humanity and mistreating AI systems that merit moral consideration in their own right. This paper argues these two dangers interact and that if we create AI systems that merit moral consideration, simultaneously avoiding both of these dangers would be extremely challenging. While our argument is straightforward and supported by a wide range of pretheoretical moral judgments, it has far-reaching…

Evolutionary debunking and value alignment – Michael T. Dale (Hampden-Sydney College) and Bradford Saad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

This paper examines the bearing of evolutionary debunking arguments—which use the evolutionary origins of values to challenge their epistemic credentials—on the alignment problem, i.e. the problem of ensuring that highly capable AI systems are properly aligned with values. Since evolutionary debunking arguments are among the best empirically-motivated arguments that recommend changes in values, it is unsurprising that they are relevant to the alignment problem. However, how evolutionary debunking arguments…

Against Willing Servitude: Autonomy in the Ethics of Advanced Artificial Intelligence – Adam Bales (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

Some people believe that advanced artificial intelligence systems (AIs) might, in the future, come to have moral status. Further, humans might be tempted to design such AIs that they serve us, carrying out tasks that make our lives better. This raises the question of whether designing AIs with moral status to be willing servants would problematically violate their autonomy. In this paper, I argue that it would in fact do so.