Artificial Intelligence and the Value of Choice

About

Part of the UCF Center for Ethics' Ethically Speaking Speaker Series, an interdisciplinary series on contemporary moral issues. Many of the most widely discussed ethical concerns regarding AI algorithms pertain to bad outcomes: Were its decisions accurate? Were there unforeseen bad consequences? Were untoward biases reflected in the judgments of the algorithms? In this presentation, Dr. Bhargava will argue that even if these bad outcomes are ultimately engineered away, it still doesn’t settle the question of whether managers should defer to algorithms. This is not because managerial gut instincts are far superior—often they’re not. Rather, there are important (and overlooked) ethical values that become evident when we make choices, and that process would be jeopardized if abdicated to an algorithm. This is so, no matter how sophisticated algorithms ultimately become at prediction.

Bio: Vikram R. Bhargava holds a joint Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Ethics & Legal Studies (The Wharton School) and Philosophy (School of Arts and Sciences). He also is co-editor of the section on technology and business ethics in the Journal of Business Ethics. His research centers around the distinctive ethics and policy issues that technology gives rise to in organizational contexts. He is interested in technology addiction, mass social media outrage, hiring algorithms and the future of work, autonomous vehicles, and other topics related to artificial intelligence (AI). Dr. Bhargava has been interviewed by NPR, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal and has spoken at the Harvard Business School, Stanford Law School, and the University of Oxford. He also has written for popular audiences at the San Francisco Chronicle, Al Jazeera, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek. He has won the Outstanding Undergraduate Faculty of the Year award, V.I.P. Professor Award, and the Career Influencer Award. He delivers annual visiting lectures on digital technology policy and ethics to graduate students at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and Thayer School of Engineering, and he has taught courses at Wharton on multiple occasions.