A Myint Zan Law and Philosophy Lecture.

“Value alignment”—the challenge of ensuring that the outputs of artificial intelligence and other machine systems reflect and respect human values—has emerged as an urgent concern as computational technologies increasingly encroach upon central domains of human decision-making. Existing strategies for alignment fail to account for the phenomenon of “hard choices”—cases that are distinct from uncertainty, incompleteness, or indeterminacy. Instead, they operate on the assumption that, when faced with a choice between A and B, a system must either select A, select B, or arbitrarily choose between them.

Human life, however, does not conform to such tidy structures. If value alignment is to be meaningfully achieved, a different approach to AI design is required—one that accommodates the reality of hard choices. In this talk, Professor Chang presents an alternative framework for AI design that enables systems to recognise hard choices and incorporates human input in a novel and essential way. Progress toward the development of such systems—both symbolic and large language model–based—is already underway.

The Myint Zan Law and Philosophy Lecture is an annual lecture made possible by the generosity of the donor, Professor Myint Zan. Each lecture is presented by an outstanding and distinguished scholar working in law, philosophy, or at their intersection, and helps build valuable bridges across the university and beyond the academy to address fundamental challenges facing humankind.

A reception will follow in the foyer after Professor Chang's lecture. Please indicate your dietary restrictions in the registration form.

*Image by IJ-studio