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.

​

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.

​

I have convened two panels focused on "Governing AI" at the 2023 and the 2021 Mancept Workshops, respectively. I also try to contribute to the public discussion about these issues.

​

Egalitarianism and the Future of Work

I am also interested in questions related to egalitarianism, work and the impact of AI 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 CfA. We organized a similar conference at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, in May 2021.

​

Dissertation project

I defended my dissertation "Do Your Bit, Claim Your Share: Justice, Ethos, and the Individual Duty to Contribute", at Stockholm University in November of 2020. It 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.

Parts of the 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

​

Other research interests

I am also interested the legitimacy of systems of norms and sanctions, the moral aspect of markets, and I am working on a paper about the the political relevance of hypocrisy.

​