W hat happens when an internationally bestselling historian, a Nobel peace prize-winning journalist and a former politician get together to discuss the state of the world, and where we're heading? Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medieval and military historian best known for his panoramic surveys of human history, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Maria Ressa, joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, is a Filipino and American journalist who co-founded the news website Rappler. And Rory Stewart is a British academic and former Conservative MP, writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Their conversation ranged over the rise of AI, the crisis in democracy and the prospect of a Trump-Putin wedding, but began by considering a question central to all of their work: how to live a good life in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world? People have been arguing about this for thousands of years.

The prevailing discourse around AI ethics lacks the language and formalism necessary to capture the diverse ethical concerns that emerge when AI systems interact with individuals. Drawing on Sen and Nussbaum's capability approach, we present a framework formalizing a network of ethical concepts and entitlements necessary for AI systems to confer meaningful benefit or assistance to stakeholders. Such systems enhance stakeholders' ability to advance their life plans and well-being while upholding their fundamental rights. We characterize two necessary conditions for morally permissible interactions between AI systems and those impacted by their functioning, and two sufficient conditions for realizing the ideal of meaningful benefit. We then contrast this ideal with several salient failure modes, namely, forms of social interactions that constitute unjustified paternalism, coercion, deception, exploitation and domination. The proliferation of incidents involving AI in high-stakes domains underscores the gravity of these issues and the imperative to take an ethics-led approach to AI systems from their inception.

Boston Dynamics recently released a video introducing Atlas, a six-foot bipedal humanoid robot capable of search and rescue missions. Part of the video contained employees apparently abusing Atlas (for example, kicking, hitting it with a hockey stick, pushing it with a heavy ball). The video quickly raised a public and academic debate regarding how humans should treat robots. A robot, in some sense, is nothing more than software embedded in hardware, much like a laptop computer. If it is your property and kicking it harms no one nor infringes on anyone's rights, it's okay to kick it, although that would be a stupid thing to do. Likewise, there seems to be no significant reason that kicking a robot should be deemed as a moral or legal wrong. However, the question--"What do we owe to robots?"--is not that simple. Philosophers and legal scholars have seriously explored and defended some significant aspects of the moral and legal status of robots--and their rights.3,6,15,16,24,29,36 In fact, various non-natural entities--for example, corporations--are treated as persons and even enjoy some constitutional rights.a In addition, humans are not the only species that get moral and legal status. In most developed societies, for example, moral and legal considerations preclude researchers from gratuitously using animals for lab experiments. The fact that corporations are treated as persons and animals are recognized as having some rights does not entail that robots should be treated analogously. These facts are instructive, however.

Unfortunately, "Deathloop" indulges the habit -- not unique to games -- of dabbling in deep questions in ways that are ripe for excavation across subreddits and video essays, but are not necessarily engaged with or even felt in the course of play. There are hundreds of lines of dialogue, primarily conversations with Julianna, that alight upon what it means to live a good life, the ways in which perspective can reshape what a "good life" means, being amenable to change, and living in defiance of cruelty and evil. But the game is about those moments in the same way a car is about its stereo system. It may be nice to have. It may even be essential to you.

What is the contribution that the arts and humanities can make to our engagement with the increasingly pervasive technology of artificial intelligence? My aim in this short article is to sketch some of these potential contributions. Perhaps the most fundamental contribution of the arts and humanities is to make vivid the fact that the development of AI is not a matter of destiny, but instead involves successive waves of highly consequential human choices. It's important to identify the choices, to frame them in the right way, and to raise the question: who gets to make them and how? This is important because AI, and digital technology generally, has become the latest focus of the historicist myth that social evolution is preordained, that our social world is determined by independent variables over which we, as individuals or societies, are able to exert little control.

AI robots are still not sophisticated enough to understand humans or the complexity of social situations, says UNSW's Dr Masimiliano Cappuccio. "So we need to think about how we interact with social and companion robots to instead help us become more aware of our own behaviour, limitations, vices or bad habits," says Dr Cappuccio, the Deputy Director of Values in Defense and Security Technology at UNSW Canberra. "And this can be in the areas of greater self-discipline and self-control but also in learning virtues such as generosity and empathy." Dr Cappuccio is the lead author of Can Robots Make Us Better Humans? Virtuous Robotics and the Good Life with Artificial Agents which was written in collaboration with UNSW Art & Design's Dr Eduardo Sandoval and Professor Mari Velonaki along with academics from the University of Western Sydney and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden It is also the first in a collection co-edited by Dr Cappuccio, Dr Sandoval and Prof. Velonaki and published in the International Journal of Robotics as a special issue titled Virtuous Robotics: Artificial Agents and the Good Life.

As an IBM futurist and influencer, I was honored to be part of the World of Watson event (#ibmwow) two months ago in Vegas. Since then, one presentation has been rambling around my soul and my brain. Shannon Vallor, is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, and author of Technology and the Virtues. She gave a brilliant talk on AI, Ethics and the Future of Human Flourishing. She pinpointed why AI raises ethical questions we must answer, and conversations we must have.

Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we've believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We've also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we've believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we're pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV. These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they've become ridiculous, because there's not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won't pay the bills – unless of course you've landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.

A new age is dawning. Whether it is a wonderful one or a terrible one remains to be seen. Look around and the signs of dizzying technological progress are difficult to miss. Driverless cars and drones, not long ago the stuff of science fiction, are now oddities that can occasionally be spotted in the wild and which will soon be a commonplace in cities around the world. With a few flicks of a finger, we can use our phones to order up a meal, or a car, or a translation for a waiter's query in a foreign country. Gadgets such as the Amazon Echo are finding their way into living rooms, where they sit listening, ready to comply with a voice command. Just a few years ago, one could dismiss the digital age as consisting of little more than social networks and cat videos; no longer.