Kathleen Creel: Examining Ethical Questions in AI

It's safe to say that Plato and his contemporaries never grappled with moral questions raised by the development of neural networks or issues surrounding data privacy and security. But a few modern philosophers – like Kathleen Creel – are doing just that as they harness age-old ideas about knowledge, existence, and ethics to understand and respond to the challenges posed by today's technology. "I still get a lot from Plato and other historical philosophers, but the task of philosophy is to figure out what the questions of a particular age, of a particular society or culture are, and to ask how philosophy can help to address them," Creel says. "It gives us a clearer moral system to help sort through what our priorities ought to be, and how we should act in our lives." Creel is finishing a two-year Embedded EthiCS Postdoctoral Fellowship based at Stanford's McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).