Professor Floridi appointed to Google’s Advanced Technology External Advisory Council

Google has appointed Professor Luciano Floridi, Professorial Fellow of Exeter College and Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the Oxford Internet Institute, to its new Advanced Technology External Advisory Council. The Advisory Council will help advance the responsible development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by considering some of the most complex questions Google faces as the tech giant develops AI. Among the topics the group will consider are facial recognition and fairness in machine learning.

Google has named eight people on the Advisory Council, who will bring diverse perspectives to the discussions. They are Alessandro Acquisti, a leading behavioural economist and privacy researcher; Bubacarr Bah, an expert in applied and computational mathematics; De Kai, a leading researcher in natural language processing, music technology and machine learning; Dyan Gibbens, an expert in industrial engineering and unmanned systems; Joanna Bryson, an expert in psychology and AI, and a longtime leader in AI ethic; Kay Coles James, a public policy expert with extensive experience working at the local, state and federal levels of government; Luciano Floridi, a leading philosopher and expert in digital ethics; and William Joseph Burns, a foreign policy expert and diplomat.

The Advisory Council will meet four times in 2019, starting in April, and Google plans to publish a report summarising the discussions in due course. The organisation hopes that the Advisory Council’s work will help inform its own practice and also that of the wider technology sector.

Reacting to the appointment on Twitter, Professor Floridi said he was excited to join Google’s Advanced Technology External Advisory Council for the responsible development of AI.