Please note the sound quality on this recording is not 100% perfect, but has been cleaned up as best as possible.
Abstract: People buy and use some goods, including social media platforms, that they do not enjoy and wish did not exist. They might even be willing to pay a great deal for such goods, whether the currency involves time or money. One reason involves signalling to others; so long as the good exists, non-consumption might give an unwanted signal to friends or colleagues. Another reason involves self-signalling; so long as the good exists, non-consumption might give an unwanted signal to an agent about himself or herself. Yet another reason involves a combination of network effects and status competition; non-consumption might deprive people of the benefits of participating in a network, and thus cause them to lose relative position. These are rapidly growing problems in an age of AI. Efforts to measure people’s willingness to pay for goods of this kind will suggest a welfare gain, and possibly a substantial one, even though the existence of such goods produces a welfare loss, and possibly a substantial one. Legal responses might take the form of nudges, norm changes, taxes, subsidies, mandates, and bans.
Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioural Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defence Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He serves as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.
The Institute for Ethics in AI will bring together world-leading philosophers and other experts in the humanities with the technical developers and users of AI in academia, business and government. The ethics and governance of AI is an exceptionally vibrant area of research at Oxford and the Institute is an opportunity to take a bold leap forward from this platform.
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