The Logic of Trade-offs: Balancing Choices for Optimal Decision-Making, Luciano Floridi, Director, Digital Ethics Center, Yale University

In a world of conflicting interests and finite resources, agents are constantly faced with decisions that require compromises between constraints, opportunities, and costs. This is the art of making trade-offs, which forms the crux of rational decision-making. In this talk, Professor Floridi analyzes the logic of trade-offs, exploring the fundamental principles that underlie the process of balancing competing interests and objectives. He shall argue that such logic is part of the logic of requirements and even more broadly of a logic of design.

Luciano Floridi (Laurea, Rome La Sapienza, M.Phil. and Ph.D. Warwick) joins Yale as the Founding Director of the Digital Ethics Center and Professor in the Practice in the Cognitive Science Program. Before joining Yale, he was the OII Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford.

He has published more than 300 works on the philosophy of information, digital ethics, the ethics of AI, and the philosophy of technology. His most recent books are The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence – Principles, Challenges, and Opportunities (OUP, 2023) and The Green and The Blue – Naive Ideas to Improve Politics in the Digital Age (Wiley, 2023). His works have been translated into many languages. 

World-renowned as one of the most authoritative voices of contemporary philosophy, he is considered the founding father of the philosophy of information and one of the major interpreters of the digital revolution. He is deeply engaged with policy initiatives on the socio-ethical value and implications of digital technologies and their applications, and he collaborates closely on these topics with many governments and companies worldwide.