The Ethics and Empirics of Engineering Humanity Speaker Series, Spring 2025

Co-sponsored by the David F. and Constance B. Girard-diCarlo Center for Ethics, Integrity and Compliance and Villanova Women in Tech

Wednesday, February 19
Wednesday, March 19
Wednesday, April 9

Minority Alumni Society Classroom (Room 103)
John F. Scarpa Hall

This interdisciplinary speaker series will cover ethical, philosophical and empirical issues surrounding the engineering of artificial and human intelligence. Those include the dynamic interactions between AI and HI, how human-computer-interfaces affect humanity, how humans outsource thinking to computers and other related technologies, how digital technologies transform the production, dissemination and validation of knowledge and how ethical values translate into technological and social decisions that affect who we are and who we’re capable of being.

For further information, please contact the series organizers:
Brett Frischmann, The Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics, Villanova Law
Georg Theiner, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Villanova University and Editor, Social Epistemology

Wednesday, February 19 | 3:50–5:50 PM
3:50 PM: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination: Leveraging the Machinery of Value Sensitive Design"
4:55 PM: "Structure, Scale, and Time: Toward AI within Reason"
Batya Friedman
Professor Emeritus, University of Washington

Wednesday, March 19 : 4:45–5:50 PM
"AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference"
Arvind Narayanan 
Professor and Director of Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University

Wednesday, April 9 | 4:45–5:50 PM
"Towards Impartial Machines: Empiricist Moral Psychology for Machine Learning Research"
Cameron Buckner
Professor and Donald F. Cronin Endowed Chair in the Humanities, University of Florida