ΑΙhub.org
 

The Machine Ethics podcast: moral agents with Jen Semler


by
24 February 2026



share this:

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology’s impact on society.

Moral agents with Jen Semler

This month, Ben met in-person with Jen Semler. They chatted about what AI is, philosopher and engineer collaborations, businesses working with ethicists, machine ethics and artificial moral agents, what makes a moral agent, how to create a moral agent, types of moral decisions, the point of moral agents, how to tell if a machine is conscious, tech companies being not democratic organisations, and more…

Listen to the episode here:

Listen on YouTube here:


Jen Semler is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell Tech’s Digital Life Initiative. Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics, technology, and moral agency. She holds a DPhil (PhD) in philosophy from the University of Oxford.

About The Machine Ethics podcast

This podcast was created and is run by Ben Byford and collaborators. The podcast, and other content was first created to extend Ben’s growing interest in both the AI domain and in the associated ethics. Over the last few years the podcast has grown into a place of discussion and dissemination of important ideas, not only in AI but in tech ethics generally. As the interviews unfold on they often veer into current affairs, the future of work, environmental issues, and more. Though the core is still AI and AI Ethics, we release content that is broader and therefore hopefully more useful to the general public and practitioners.

The hope for the podcast is for it to promote debate concerning technology and society, and to foster the production of technology (and in particular, decision making algorithms) that promote human ideals.

Join in the conversation by getting in touch via email here or following us on Bluesky and Instagram.




The Machine Ethics Podcast

            AUAI is supported by:



Subscribe to AIhub newsletter on substack



Related posts :

Interview with Deepika Vemuri: interpretability and concept-based learning

  24 Apr 2026
Find out more about Deepika's research bridging the gap between data-driven models and symbolic learning.

As a ‘book scientist’ I work with microscopes, imaging technologies and AI to preserve ancient texts

  23 Apr 2026
Using an array of technologies to recover, understand and preserve many valuable ancient texts.

Sony AI table tennis robot outplays elite human players

  22 Apr 2026
New robot and AI system has beaten professional and elite table tennis players.

Causal models for decision systems: an interview with Matteo Ceriscioli

  21 Apr 2026
How can we integrate causal knowledge into agents or decision systems to make them more reliable?

A model for defect identification in materials

  20 Apr 2026
A new model measures defects that can be leveraged to improve materials’ mechanical strength, heat transfer, and energy-conversion efficiency.

‘Probably’ doesn’t mean the same thing to your AI as it does to you

  17 Apr 2026
Are you sure you and the AI chatbot you’re using are on the same page about probabilities?

Interview with Xinwei Song: strategic interactions in networked multi-agent systems

  16 Apr 2026
Xinwei Song tells us about her research using algorithmic game theory and multi-agent reinforcement learning.

2026 AI Index Report released

  15 Apr 2026
Find out what the ninth edition of the report, which was published on 13 April, says about trends in AI.



AUAI is supported by:







Subscribe to AIhub newsletter on substack




 















©2026.02 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence