We would like to welcome Walter Sinnott-Armstrong who joins the School of Philosophy as part of the Humanising Machine Intelligence (HMI) Project. Just last week he provided an outstanding first public lecture about HMI.

Walter was kind enough to share some of his hopes and plans for his stay at the ANU.

Walter is very happy to be visiting the ANU yet again. He looks forward to seeing old friends and making new friends. While he is here, he plans to write some (most?) of a trade book on moral artificial intelligence, covering various ethical issues arising from recent developments in AI, including the question of whether advanced AI in the future could ever have moral status or rights. He will also be finishing several projects on political polarization, including studies of how asking questions can reduce polarization and an App that adapts jigsaw classrooms to an escape room game that might reduce antagonism between political opponents. Another strand in his research develops measures of implicit moral attitudes both because of their philosophical lessons for moral semantics, epistemology, and responsibility and also as a tool for understanding people who misrepresent their moral beliefs, including psychopaths. Finally, he is constantly engaged in developing a contrastivist view of mental causation as a way of investigating the relationship between neuroscience and moral responsibility. He does not expect to finish all of these projects before he leaves the ANU, but he would love to talk to other visitors and staff about any of them.

We wish Walter all the best for his stay and in his projects at the ANU.