The Machine Ethics podcast: moral agents with Jen Semler

by The Machine Ethics Podcast

24 February 2026

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.

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