MARKUS FURENDAL

The social and ethical impact of Artificial Intelligence

I am interested in issues related to AI governance and the ethics of AI. Specifically, I pursue questions such as how the benefits and burdens created by increasingly capable AI ought to be distributed, and what it takes for AI governance to be democratically legitimate. My contributions to this field try to bring insights from theorizing about distributive justice and democratic theory to bear on the concrete problems and possibilities that transformative AI brings with it.

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I am currently a postdoc in a research project that asks what the key features of emerging international AI regimes are, how the nature of the evolving regimes can be explained, and what the implications of these regimes are for justice and democracy.

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I will convene a panel focused on "Governing AI" at the 2023 Mancept Workshops. It will be similar to the panel I arranged at the 2021 workshops (see the first panel's CfA.) I also try to contribute to the public discussion about the topic.

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Egalitarianism and the Future of Work

I am also interested in questions related to egalitarianism and work more broadly, and I have co-organized a conference in Rotterdam on the future of work together with Huub Brouwer (Tilburg),  Willem van der Deijl (Tilburg), and Nicholas Vrousalis (Erasmus). More information is available in the CfR. We organized a similar conference at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, in May 2021.

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Dissertation project

I defended my dissertation "Do Your Bit, Claim Your Share: Justice, Ethos, and the Individual Duty to Contribute", in November of 2020. The dissertation is about how individual action influences distributive justice, and how principles of distributive justice should influence individual action. Specifically, it addresses the questions of what justice requires of individuals, and why. I argue that individuals should not only comply with just institutions, but that they also have a pro tanto duty to contribute in their daily lives towards the furthering of a just society, based on principles of equality, reciprocity, and fairly sharing burdens. Further, I try to show that a system of informal and decentralised social sanctions – an ethos – is the best way to promote adherence to this duty. The dissertation develops and defends an account of contributive justice, specifying who should contribute to justice and why, as well as what a contribution is and how an individual duty to contribute should be enforced.

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Parts of this project were conducted as a visiting Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Harvard University and as a Visiting Doctoral Student at the Department of Politics and International Relations and The Centre for the Study of Social Justice, Oxford University. I also had the chance to be on two periods of parental leave during the project.

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Other research interests

I hope to one day find the time to think more about the legitimacy of systems of norms and sanctions, the moral aspect of markets, and the political and philosophical relevance of hypocrisy.

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