•  362
    The impact of artificial intelligence on jobs and work in New Zealand
    with James Maclaurin and Colin Gavaghan
    New Zealand Law Foundation. 2021.
    Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a diverse technology. It is already having significant effects on many jobs and sectors of the economy and over the next ten to twenty years it will drive profound changes in the way New Zealanders live and work. Within the workplace AI will have three dominant effects. This report (funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation) addresses: Chapter 1 Defining the Technology of Interest; Chapter 2 The changing nature and value of work; Chapter 3 AI and the employment rel…Read more
  •  292
    Transparency in Algorithmic and Human Decision-Making: Is There a Double Standard?
    with John Zerilli, James Maclaurin, and Colin Gavaghan
    Philosophy and Technology 32 (4): 661-683. 2018.
    We are sceptical of concerns over the opacity of algorithmic decision tools. While transparency and explainability are certainly important desiderata in algorithmic governance, we worry that automated decision-making is being held to an unrealistically high standard, possibly owing to an unrealistically high estimate of the degree of transparency attainable from human decision-makers. In this paper, we review evidence demonstrating that much human decision-making is fraught with transparency pro…Read more
  •  126
    A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence
    with James Maclaurin, John Danaher, John Zerilli, Colin Gavaghan, Joy Liddicoat, and Merel Noorman
    MIT Press. 2021.
    A concise but informative overview of AI ethics and policy. Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. Is it the game-changer it's been cracked up to be? If so, how is it changing the game? How is it likely to affect us as customers, tenants, aspiring homeowners, students, educators, patients, clients, prison inmates, members of ethnic and sexual minorities, and voters in liberal democracies? Authored by experts in fields rangin…Read more
  •  52
    Algorithmic Decision-Making and the Control Problem
    with John Zerilli, James Maclaurin, and Colin Gavaghan
    Minds and Machines 29 (4): 555-578. 2019.
    The danger of human operators devolving responsibility to machines and failing to detect cases where they fail has been recognised for many years by industrial psychologists and engineers studying the human operators of complex machines. We call it “the control problem”, understood as the tendency of the human within a human–machine control loop to become complacent, over-reliant or unduly diffident when faced with the outputs of a reliable autonomous system. While the control problem has been i…Read more
  •  48
    Predicate logic has proved a very useful tool for the expression of theories of natural language semantics. Hurford's suggestion that predicate–argument structures mirror certain properties of the human sensorimotor architecture can be seen as an explanation of why this is so. Although I support this view, I think that the correspondences that Hurford draws between linguistic and sensorimotor structures not only involve natural language semantics, but include some elements of natural language sy…Read more
  •  27
    Generative AI models should include detection mechanisms as a condition for public release
    with Dino Pedreschi, Raja Chatila, Tapabrata Chakraborti, Susan Leavy, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, David Eyers, Andrew Trotman, Paul D. Teal, Przemyslaw Biecek, Stuart Russell, and Yoshua Bengio
    Ethics and Information Technology 25 (4): 1-7. 2023.
    The new wave of ‘foundation models’—general-purpose generative AI models, for production of text (e.g., ChatGPT) or images (e.g., MidJourney)—represent a dramatic advance in the state of the art for AI. But their use also introduces a range of new risks, which has prompted an ongoing conversation about possible regulatory mechanisms. Here we propose a specific principle that should be incorporated into legislation: that any organization developing a foundation model intended for public use must …Read more
  •  13
    Roles for Event Representations in Sensorimotor Experience, Memory Formation, and Language Processing
    with Martin Takac
    Topics in Cognitive Science 13 (1): 187-205. 2021.
    Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 13, Issue 1, Page 187-205, January 2021.
  •  13
    Event‐Predictive Cognition: A Root for Conceptual Human Thought
    with Martin V. Butz, Asya Achimova, and David Bilkey
    Topics in Cognitive Science 13 (1): 10-24. 2021.
    Butz, Achimova, Bilkey, and Knott provide a topic overview and discuss whether the special issue contributions may imply that event‐predictive abilities constitute a root for conceptual human thought, because they enable complex, mutually beneficial, but also intricately competitive, social interactions and language communication.
  •  11
    Event‐Predictive Cognition: A Root for Conceptual Human Thought
    with Martin V. Butz, Asya Achimova, and David Bilkey
    Topics in Cognitive Science 13 (1): 10-24. 2021.
    Butz, Achimova, Bilkey, and Knott provide a topic overview and discuss whether the special issue contributions may imply that event‐predictive abilities constitute a root for conceptual human thought, because they enable complex, mutually beneficial, but also intricately competitive, social interactions and language communication.
  •  10
    Levels of Representation in Discourse Relations
    with Ted Sanders and Jon Oberlander
    Cognitive Linguistics 12 (3). 2002.