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Workshop Explores New Philosophical Approaches to Computing

illustration of a computer network with blue and white lights

A workshop on Sept. 27 and 28 at Yale Law School sought to bring together the best philosophical work on normative questions raised by computing. The MINT-Yale Workshop on Normative Philosophy of Computing was a collaboration between Yale Law School’s Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy Scott Shapiro ’90 and Associate Professor of Law Ketan Ramakrishnan ’21, and Seth Lazar, Professor of Philosophy at Australia National University and the head of the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab.

Since AI and related advanced computing technologies are already embedded in society, MINT Lab argues that “we need to know just how its use can be justified. To do this, we need to develop a robust new subfield: the normative philosophy of computing,” according to its website.

The workshop aimed to address critical questions about what proper usage of these technologies looks like, who gets to determine the answers, and how the power over norms should be constrained.

The workshop featured relevant work by early career scholars. The weekend opened with a talk on “Defining Artificial Agency: Are Frontier AI Systems Agents?” from Jacqueline Harding (Stanford). Consequent Spotlight Talks covered “Large Language Models are responsive to the semantic properties of their prompts,” by Megan Hyska (Northwestern University) and “Should We Morally Defer to AI Assistants?” by Valena Marie Caroline Reich (University of Cambridge).

The conference further addressed social epistemology, social philosophy of language, aesthetics, and normative approaches to philosophy of science and philosophy of the mind. M.K. Crockett (Princeton) spoke on “AI Surrogates as Agents of Epistemic Oppression,” and Jenny Yi-Chen Wu (UCLA) asked, “What Is Social System Hacking?”

Other presentations included “Representative Algorithms,” by Isaac Taylor (Stockholm University), “Opacity and Operative Reasons,” by Samuel Dishaw (Université Catholique de Louvain), and the closing talk “Efficient Information Storage as an Epistemic Norm,” from James Hernández McIntyre (Rutgers).

The conference was sponsored by the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School and Schmidt Sciences AI 2050.