#AI Ethics

The full intellectual story of AI alignment research — from Norbert Wiener's early warnings to the technical work of the current era, from the philosophical foundations to the specific technical approaches. The most important unsolved problem in AI, and the people trying to solve it before it matters most.

How AI systems trained on human-generated data encode and amplify the biases, inequities, and prejudices of the societies that generated that data — and the researchers who are trying to understand, measure, and mitigate these harms. The most practically urgent problem in deployed AI, the hardest to solve, and the one with the most direct consequences for the most people.

The hardest philosophical problem raised by artificial intelligence — whether AI systems can have inner experience, whether there is something it is like to be a language model, and what the answer means for how we build and treat AI systems. The question that philosophy has been building toward for centuries and that AI has made impossible to defer any longer.

The Stanford professor who assembled fourteen million labelled images when everyone told her the project was impossible, built the benchmark that made the deep learning revolution possible, went to Google as Chief AI Scientist, returned to academia to lead the movement for human-centered AI, and became one of the most important voices connecting technical capability to human values. The complete portrait of the creator of ImageNet.

The researcher who built the Atlas of AI — the most comprehensive account of the material, political, and social dimensions of AI development — and who has been arguing, against a field that preferred not to hear it, that AI is not a neutral technology but a product of specific choices made by specific people with specific interests. The most important critical voice in contemporary AI.

The AI ethics researcher who was fired from Google for co-authoring a paper that criticised large language models — and who turned that firing into the founding of the Distributed AI Research Institute, one of the most important independent AI research organisations in the world. The full story of the event that crystallised the tension between AI safety rhetoric and AI research practice.

He built the world's first chatbot as a demonstration of how shallow conversation could be — and watched in horror as people fell in love with it. The story of Joseph Weizenbaum: the man who understood, earlier and more clearly than almost anyone, what was dangerous about our relationship with intelligent machines, and who spent the rest of his life trying to make the world hear the warning.

He invented cybernetics, the science of communication and control in machines and animals. He warned the world about automation destroying human labour — in 1950. He predicted the ethical crises of AI before the field had a name. And almost nobody listened. The forgotten genius who saw everything coming.