UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Two free lectures by internationally respected ethics experts will headline “Media Challenges to Digital Flourishing,” a two-day symposium hosted by the Donald W. Davis Program in Ethical Leadership at Penn State and scheduled Oct. 22-23 on the University Park campus.
The third biennial symposium also will feature the work of selected scholars in the fields of technology and media ethics after each day’s keynote lecture.
Both lectures begin at 9 a.m. in the Flex Theatre of the HUB-Robeson Center.
On Oct. 22, Sylvie Delacroix of King’s College London will present “Designing for Productive Uncertainty: Why Participatory AI Interfaces Matter.”
On Oct. 23, Mario De Caro of Roma Tre University will present “Rethinking Ethics-by-Design: A Practical-Wisdom Approach.”
Delacroix is the inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law and King’s College London, where she directs the Centre For Data Features, and a visiting professor at Tohoku University. Her work sits at the intersection of law, philosophy and the design of AI systems, with a particular focus on how technologies shape moral and democratic agency. Her current research program, NAVIGATE, examines how large language models communicate uncertainty and how participatory design can preserve the conditions for ethical questioning and collective norm-refinement. Her work on data trust and bottom-up data governance has informed policy in the U.K. and internationally. She writes and speaks widely, to both scholarly and public audiences, about what it takes to keep the shaping of AI systems in the hands of the communities they affect.
With her talk, Delacroix will highlight a central moral issue in AI development: the inherent limitations in how it handles uncertainty. Delacroix makes the case for the development of more participatory AI interfaces, whose management of uncertainty is determined by the communities they serve.
De Caro, a professor of moral philosophy at Roma Tre University, holds the UNESCO Chair in Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Wisdom. He regularly serves as a visiting professor at Tufts University and was a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at MIT. He is president of the Society for Ethics and Politics of Artificial Intelligence, and a consultant to the Italian Ministry of Labor. His research focuses on moral philosophy, AI ethics, philosophical naturalism, the philosophy of mind, and the history of philosophy in the early modern period.
With his talk, De Caro said he plans to connect AI’s shift from deterministic, top-down systems to probabilistic, bottom-up approaches with philosophy’s turn toward context-sensitive ethics, and connects this to a framework to help us understand how we can cultivate practical wisdom.
In addition to the coordination efforts by Patrick Plaisance, Davis Professor in Ethics, the event is co-sponsored by the Bellisario College, the Rock Ethics Institute and the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication.
