Members
Co-leads: Turhan Canli
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Activities
Speaker Series on AI & Consciousness
The group organizes talks about ethical issues in AI research and technology applications featuring experts from a wide range of disciplines. Speakers have included:
- Matthew Salzano
- Wendell Wallach
- Karen Herrera-Ferrá
- Ryan L. Boyd
- Veljko Dubljević
AI and DEIA: Getting at the Roots, with Matthew Salzano
Monday, March 3, 2025
1:00pm EST / 19.00 CET
Matthew Salzano, PhD, will give a short talk and lead a conversation about AI and DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access). Drawing from scholarship in communication, rhetoric, and critical digital studies, Salzano explains how we are often ‘trimming branches’ when we need to ‘pull out roots’ — and introduces new terms and questions that can help reorient our conversations about AI and DEIA.
Past Events
Moral Intelligence in the Digital Age, with Wendell Wallach
February 3, 2025
Collin Allen and I noted in our 2008 book Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong, that consciousness, a theory of mind, sociability, situational awareness and embodiment are all supra-rational (beyond reason) capabilities that contribute to making ethical decision. Whether any of these can be fully instantiated in machines remains an open question. Nevertheless, moral decision making in the digital age will require an evolution in and refinement of specific skills for both humans and for AI. I call one of these evolutions in moral decision making capabilities “tradeoff ethics” and another “a silent ethics”. Aspects of this social, and not just technological evolution, will require research by neuroscientists.
Speaker: Wendell Wallach has an international reputation as an expert on the ethics and governance of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. He is also senior advisor to The Hastings Center and a scholar at the Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics where he chaired Technology and Ethics studies for eleven years. Wallach’s latest book, a primer on emerging technologies, is titled, A Dangerous Master: How to keep technology from slipping beyond our control. He co-authored (with Colin Allen) Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong. Wallach has been referred to as, “a Godfather of AI Ethics.”
Perceptions, errors, and biases of AI… and of humans
January 13, 2025
Artificial intelligence (AI) has existed as a tool for a long time, performing simple tasks such as sorting documents, suggesting music, and so on. But with the development of new generations of AI, the perception of its value to society has been increasing, as it can bring potential and promising benefit in many areas of human life. AI is known to have “errors or biases” that result in strange or even dangerous responses, but what happens when, in AI-human interaction, there are human cognitive errors or biases — such as perceptions, which could also be influenced by culture.
Speaker: Dr. Karen Herrera-Ferrá is an independent and global consultant on ethical, medical, psychological, legal, social, cultural, policy-making, human rights and political issues and concerns on the development and use of neuroscience, neurotechnology and AI. She is a former member of the Board of Directors of the International Neuroethics Society.
Bringing Trustworthiness in Generative AI and Agentic AI Using Thought Knowledge Graphs
December 2, 2024
Speaker: Manas Gaur, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), USA.
The integration of AI systems into high-stakes domains demands unprecedented levels of trustworthiness. Recent challenges with generative AI—from hallucinations to bias—have intensified this imperative. This talk introduces Thought Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) alongside Neurosymbolic AI, a framework that models trustworthiness as a function of consistency, reliability, explainability, and safety. TKGs capture the cognitive architecture of human reasoning by mapping the dynamic interplay of knowledge acquisition, question generation, perspective-taking, argumentation, and confidence assessment. This approach bridges the fundamental gap between language and thought in AI systems, offering a scalable method to generate trustworthy responses through systematic traversal of interconnected reasoning paths. Drawing on successful implementations in healthcare and mental health domains, I will demonstrate how TKGs enable AI systems to reason about knowledge gaps, generate targeted questions, distinguish between individual and population-level uncertainties, validate argumentation paths, and appropriately calibrate confidence levels. The presentation will showcase novel methods for implementing TKGs using generative AI, establishing their potential to revolutionize how we build and deploy trustworthy AI systems in critical contexts.
Psychological Science with Big Behavioral Data: The Past, Present and Future
March 18, 2024
Today, the unprecedented access to both vast amounts of human-generated data — and the computational power to analyze it — has led to a rapid reshaping of the social sciences. This presentation will explore how we learn about people using big data, including language, images, and online behaviors. We’ll look at how psychological science has evolved in its use of digital trace information over time, from its formative days to today’s digital age. We’ll discuss current methods and the huge amount of data available, with peeks into the future that consider both possibilities and ethical concerns.
Speaker: Ryan L. Boyd is an Associate Research Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. His research uses computational methods to understand how verbal behavior reflects and shapes our psychology in everyday life, ranging from individual personality to society-level processes, psychopathology, affective mechanisms, and interpersonal processes. He has authored dozens of free, open-source text analysis applications for social scientists and is one of the lead scholars behind the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. Dr. Boyd’s work has been cited by regulatory bodies/committees including the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre Report on Technology and Democracy.
The Need for Neurocomputational Ethics
November 27, 2023
Special topics in neuroethics are on the rise. Neuro-Computational Ethics, as one of them, deserves more sustained attention and scholarship. The National Academy of Engineering tasked leading technological thinkers with identifying grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. Most of the challenges and opportunities that they came up with are more or less irrelevant for neuroethics. However, “Reverse-Engineering the Brain” (NAE 2023) is a topic of neuroethical import par excellence. Reverse-engineering the brain as an engineering challenge starts with the premise that general-purpose artificial intelligence has remained elusive because artificial brains have been designed without much attention to real ones. This intersection of engineering and neuroscience promises great advances and brings novel ethical challenges. We can count on engineering’s and neurosciences’ best minds to continue relentlessly pursuing the creation of computers emulating human intelligence, with massively parallel processing and vast connectivity, akin to human neural networks.
In this talk, I reviewed recent work from my NeuroComputational Ethics Research Group (go.ncsu.edu/ncerg) and noted areas that need for more sustained ethical reflection, such as implementation of neurocomputational models in AI agents, or technological coupling of brains and computers, and other emerging issues at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neurotechnology.
Speaker: Dr. Veljko Dubljević, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Science, Technology & Society (STS) at NC State. Before NC State, he spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Neuroethics Research Unit at IRCM and McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has a background in philosophy, economics, bioethics and neuroscience.