Iason Gabriel | The ethics of advanced AI assistants

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Iason Gabriel, a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind whose work focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence, including questions about AI value alignment, distributive justice, language ethics and human rights.
Gabriel has contributed to several projects that promote responsible innovation in AI, including the creation of the ethics review process at NeurIPS. Before joining DeepMind, Gabriel taught moral and political philosophy at Oxford University, and worked for the United Nations Development Program in Lebanon and Sudan.
Talk title:
“The ethics of advanced AI assistants”
Abstract:
The development of general-purpose foundation models such as Gemini and GPT-4 has paved the way for increasingly advanced AI assistants. While early assistant technologies, such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, used narrow AI to identify and respond to speaker commands, more advanced AI assistants demonstrate greater generality, autonomy and scope of application. They also possess novel capabilities such as summarization, idea generation, planning, memory, and tool-use-skills that will likely develop further as the underlying technology continues to improve.
Advanced AI assistants could be used for a range of productive purposes, including as creative partners, research assistants, educational tutors, digital counsellors, or life planners. However, they could also have a profound effect on society, fundamentally reshaping the way people relate to AI. The development and deployment of advanced assistants therefore requires careful evaluation and foresight. In particular we may want ask:
What might a world populated by advanced AI assistants look like? 
How will people relate to new, more capable, forms of AI that have human-like traits and with which they’re able to converse fluently? 
How might these dynamics play out at a societal level-in a world with millions of AI assistants interacting with one another on their user’s behalf?
This talk will explore a range of ethical and societal questions that arise in the context of assistants, including value alignment and safety, anthropomorphism and human relationships with AI, and questions about collective action, equity, and overall societal impact.
Suggested readings:
Chan et al. “Harms from Increasingly Agentic Algorithmic Systems,” ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), 2023.
Shavit et al. “Practices for Governing Agentic AI Systems,” OpenAI, 2023.
Morris et al. “Levels of AGI: Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI,” Google DeepMind, 2023 (updated 2024).
About Iason Gabriel
Iason Gabriel is a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind, where he works in the ethics research team. His work focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence, including questions about AI value alignment, distributive justice, language ethics, and human rights.
More generally, Gabriel is interested in AI and human values, and in ensuring that technology works well for the benefit of all. He has contributed to several projects that promote responsible innovation in AI, including the creation of the ethics review process at NeurIPS.
Before joining DeepMind, Gabriel taught moral and political philosophy at Oxford University, and worked for the United Nations Development Program in Lebanon and Sudan.
About the SRI Seminar Series
The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.
Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by an open discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.