AI Institute for Societal Decision Making Seminar - Alex London

— 4:30pm

Location:
In Person and Virtual - ET - Gates Hillman 8102 and Zoom

Speaker:
ALEX LONDON, K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/philosophy/people/faculty/london.html

When AI Can No Longer Help: Agency Transfer Agreements for Assistive AI Systems

As the populations of many high-income countries age there is growing interest in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that would support older adults and extend their ability to live independently. This includes AI systems that function as personal assistants helping to manage finances, pay bills, organize health-related information, assist with medications, monitor health status, manage schedules, or call for emergency assistance. 

This talk identifies strategies that AI systems might use to extend the decisional capacity of older adults and with this their ability to manage important cognitive tasks required for independent living. It then introduces the idea of an “agency transfer point,” defined as the point at which responsibility for a specific task must be transferred to another person because the older adult’s cognitive decline exceeds the ability of an AI system to extend their decisional capacity for that task. As the ability of AI systems to provide such support increases, so does the probability that some individuals will reach an agency transfer point while living independently. 

This talk provides an ethical analysis of strategies for addressing the risks to older adults from being in a situation where they are no longer capable of managing a task, but no agent has been identified to assume responsibility for that task. This includes a discussion of requiring, as a condition for using such systems, that older adults create an “advance directive” that identifies the person to whom they prefer to transfer responsibility once an agency transfer point has been reached. 

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Alex John London is the K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University. An elected Fellow of the Hastings Center, Professor London’s work focuses on ethical and policy issues surrounding the development and deployment of novel technologies in medicine, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. His book, For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics is available in hard copy from Oxford University Press and is available in PDF as an open access title. He is a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Group on Ethics and Governance of AI whose “Guidance on Large Multi-Modal Models” was published in 2024 and whose report, “Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health” was published in 2021. From 2022–2023 he was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine Committee on Creating a Framework for Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation in Health and Medicine, whose report "Toward Equitable Innovation in Health and Medicine: A Framework” was published in 2023. He is currently a co-leader of the ethics core for the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING).

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Event Website:
https://www.cmu.edu/ai-sdm/events/index.html