Description
Episode 143 I spoke with Iason Gabriel about: * Value alignment * Technology and worldmaking * How AI systems affect individuals and the social world Iason is a philosopher and Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. His work focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence, including questions about AI value alignment , distributive justice , language ethics and human rights . You can find him on his website and Twitter /X. Find me on Twitter (or LinkedIn if you want…) for updates, and reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions. Outline * (00:00) Intro * (01:18) Iason’s intellectual development * (04:28) Aligning language models with human values, democratic civility and agonism * (08:20) Overlapping consensus, differing norms, procedures for identifying norms * (13:27) Rawls’ theory of justice, the justificatory and stability problems * (19:18) Aligning LLMs and cooperation, speech acts, justification and discourse norms, literacy * (23:45) Actor Network Theory and alignment * (27:25) Value alignment and Iason’s starting points * (33:10) The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants, AI’s impacts on social processes and users, personalization * (37:50) AGI systems and social power * (39:00) Displays of care and compassion, Machine Love (Joel Lehman) * (41:30) Virtue ethics, morality and language, virtue in AI systems vs. MacIntyre’s conception in After Virtue * (45:00) The Challenge of Value Alignment * (45:25) Technologists as worldmakers * (51:30) Technological determinism, collective action problems * (55:25) Iason’s goals with his work * (58:32) Outro Links Papers: * AI, Values, and Alignment (2020) * Aligning LMs with Human Values (2023) * Toward a Theory of Justice for AI (2023) * The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (2024) * A matter of principle? AI alignment as the fair treatment of claims (2025) Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe