I was privileged to attend and speak at the AI Summit in Oxford last week (with huge thanks to Ajit Jaokar and the rest of the team for making it happen). As ever, I learnt a lot from the formal presentations, and even more from the conversations during breaks. However, the moments that really shaped my thinking were those which challenged my preconceptions. Here are three of those challenges:

Why don’t you like the Stoics?

In my own keynote session, I talked about one of my favourite topics: AI ethics, and how we can use ideas about virtue, vice and flourishing to develop a rounded, flexible and human response to the challenges of new technology. (I also wrote about this last week.) In that talk, I dismissed other forms of philosophy that seem to be popular in Silicon Valley, particularly utilitarianism (too concerned with optimisation), deontology (too focused on finding rules which probably don’t exist) and Stoicism. I also rashly promised, that I would explain my antipathy to these schools of thought during the break.