Description

🎙️ The Emergent Podcast – Episode 7

Machine Ethics: Do unto agents...

with Justin Harnish & Nick Baguley

In Episode 7, Justin and Nick step directly into one of the most complex frontiers in emergent AI: machine ethics — what it means for advanced AI systems to behave ethically, understand values, support human flourishing, and possibly one day feel moral weight.

This episode builds on themes from the AI Goals Forecast (AI-2027), embodied cognition, consciousness, and the hard technical realities of encoding values into agentic systems.

🔍 Episode Summary

Ethics is no longer just a philosophical debate — it’s now a design constraint for powerful AI systems capable of autonomous action. Justin and Nick unpack:

1. Why ethics matters more for AI than any prior technology
2. Whether an AI can “understand” right and wrong or merely behave correctly
3. The technical and moral meaning of corrigibility (the ability for AI to accept correction)
4. Why rules-based morality may never be enough
5. Whether consciousness is required for morality
6. How embodiment might influence empathy
7. And how goals, values, and emergent behavior intersect in agentic AI

They trace ethics from Aristotle to AI-2027’s goal-based architectures, to Damasio’s embodied consciousness, to Sam Harris’ view of consciousness and the illusion of self, to the hard problem of whether a machine can experience moral stakes.

🧠 Major Topics Covered

1. What Do We Mean by Ethics?

Justin and Nick begin by grounding ethics in its philosophical roots:

Ethos → virtue → flourishing.

Ethics isn’t just rule-following — it’s about character, intention, and outcomes.

They connect this to the ways AI is already making decisions in vehicles, financial systems, healthcare, and human relationships.

2. AI Goals & Corrigibility

AI-2027 outlines a hierarchy of AI goal types — from written specifications to unintended proxies to reward hacking to self-preservation drives.

Nick explains why corrigibility — the ability for AI to accept shutdown or redirection — is foundational.

Anthropic’s Constitutional AI makes an appearance as a real-world example.

3. Goals vs. Values

Justin distinguishes between:

1. Goals: task-specific optimization criteria
2. Values: deeper principles shaping which goals matter

AI may follow rules without understanding values — similar to a child with chores but no moral context.

This raises the key question:

Can a system have values without consciousness?

4. Is Consciousness Required for Ethics?

A major thread of the episode:

Is a non-conscious “zombie” AI capable of morality?

5. Embodiment & Empathy

Justin and Nick explore whether AI needs a body — or at least a simulated body — to:

1. Learn empathy