Paul R. Dixon

I am currently an MPhil/PhD researcher in philosophy at King’s College London, investigating the moral status of artificial systems. Before returning to academic study, I spent more than thirty years working on the front line of global financial markets – in derivatives, investment banking, financial risk, financial technology and asset management. That experience was all-consuming and highly rewarding, but it also made me somewhat sceptical of theories and models that presented financial markets as scientifically tractable, deterministic and predictable. Questioning the assumptions behind models and markets first drew me towards analytic philosophy.

My philosophical enquiries began with economics and the social sciences, before turning to AI. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have since convinced me that philosophy can and should play an immediate and consequential role in shaping this technology and its effects on politics, economics and society. My research is focused on AI safety and the ethics of AI.

My central research question is whether an artificial system could ever – perhaps surprisingly – matter morally in its own right. Answering it requires us to examine sentience, consciousness, embodiment, agency and welfare – and to decide what evidence would justify extending moral consideration beyond biological beings.

These questions are no longer remote. Increasingly capable AI systems are already affecting economies, institutions and human relationships. If future systems acquire morally significant capacities, the decisions made in research, design and governance today may determine not only what such systems do to us, but what we are permitted to do to them.