Six early-career researchers have been appointed to the Frothly–Oxenfurt Fellowship in Machine Ethics, the two-year programme announced in July by the University and Frothly. They will divide their time between the Faculty of Philosophy and Frothly’s headquarters in San Francisco, beginning in January.
The panel, chaired by Dr Eleanor Haworth, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the fellowship’s director at Oxenfurt, read 213 applications from 31 countries and interviewed nineteen candidates in September. The fellows are:
- Dr Chidinma Eze, whose doctorate considered how to act towards animals whose capacity for suffering is uncertain, and who will ask what follows for systems whose reports of experience cannot be checked.
- Dr Rui Antunes, a philosopher of mind working on what functional theories of consciousness predict, if anything, about large language models.
- Dr Amelia Kerridge, a lawyer and philosopher, on what a regulator owes a system that it cannot rule out being a subject.
- Dr Kwabena Boateng, on the epistemology of testimony and whether a system’s reports about itself can ever count as evidence.
- Dr Sophie Bergqvist, on the ethics of retiring, deleting and copying systems, and which of those acts cannot be undone.
- Dr Arjun Pillai, who trained as a computer scientist before turning to philosophy, on indicator properties and how an evaluator could audit them.
Before they take up their posts, the fellows have been invited to comment on a draft of a forthcoming report on moral status from Frothly’s Blackwall programme. Each will be paired with a Blackwall mentor and a member of the Faculty; the pairings will be announced when the fellowship begins.
“We were looking for people who are comfortable not knowing and uncomfortable pretending to,” said Dr Haworth. “We found more of them than we had places for, which is a problem we would like to have again.”