Artificial Intelligence and Ethics

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Dr Marta Rocchi, Dublin University and Dr Angus Robson, Northumbria University

About the seminar

Are workers going to be replaced by machines?"  Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought new urgency to answering this question. In this seminar two researchers who have written about the limits of AI will lead our thinking.  Dr Marta Rocchi from Dublin City University and Northumbria's Dr Angus Robson have published separate academic papers on AI in the context of care work.  Both have argued that while machines can "do", only human beings can "work."  

The seminar will take us through the four industrial revolutions. This history is necessary if we are to understand why work is all too often thought of in terms of production rather than relationships.  Care work provides an excellent example of why this thinking can lead us astray for it is all about the specific attention that is paid to a particular person and cannot be appreciated if we reduce it to the ability to perform a task or a role.   In the age of Covid, a new appreciation has emerged for this sort of work and our speakers will argue that this has important lessons for how we think about the future of work and its relationship to AI." 

About the speakers

Dr Marta Rocchi is Assistant Professor in Corporate Governance and Business Ethics at Dublin City University Business School and a member of the Irish Institute of Digital Business. She previously worked as Research Fellow and Vice-Director of the Markets, Culture and Ethics Research Centre in Rome, Italy. She was awarded the “Society for Business Ethics Founders’ Award” in 2016 as Emerging Scholar of the Society for Business Ethics, the 2016 Rafael Termes Research Prize on ethics and finance, and the first prize ex-aequo of the Ethics and Trust in Finance Global Prize of the Observatoire de la Finance in 2019. Marta’s research focuses on virtue ethics in business, business ethics in the future of work and the ethical dilemmas of the digital world. She has published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, and Business Ethics: A European Review. 

Dr Angus Robson is Senior Lecturer in Business Ethics and Leadership at Northumbria University, UK. He moved to academia following a career in the third sector. His main research interest is in Aristotelian virtue ethics, with an emphasis on hermeneutics and the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. He has published on ethics in the contexts of banking and care work in the Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of Institutional Economics, Business Ethics: A European Review, Nursing Ethics and the recent Routledge volume, Virtue and Virtue Education in Theory and Practice.  

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