Ethics In Real Life: Disagreement in the Age of AI

Inspired by the Ethics in America series aired on PBS in the 1980s, this event will convene a number of scholars, practitioners, and thought leaders in a Socratic-style conversation designed to foster thoughtful, spontaneous exchange rather than prepared remarks. 

The intellectual framing of this year’s program begins from a long-standing insight in philosophical and social thought: that human identity and moral life are formed through encounter and interdependence—through how we live and build relationships with others.

As generative AI systems increasingly shape how people learn, work, seek companionship, and experience solitude, we ask: what happens to human relationships when technologies can meet us in the very forms of interaction through which those relationships have traditionally been constituted? How might the availability of fluent, responsive, non-human interlocutors reshape the value we place on the effort, vulnerability, and reciprocity required by relationships with other humans—and, in turn, our understanding of the human condition itself? 

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. 

About the Moderator: 

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, he taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

Lessig is the founder of Equal Citizens and a founding board member of Creative Commons, and serves on the Scientific Board of AXA Research Fund. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, he has received numerous awards including a Webby, the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Scientific American 50 Award, and Fastcase 50 Award.

Once cited by The New Yorker as “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era,” Lessig has turned his focus from law and technology to “institutional corruption”—relationships which, while legal, weaken public trust in an institution—especially as that affects democracy.

About the Panelists

Professor Shannon Vallor, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy. She co-directs EFI's Centre for Technomoral Futures and the UKRI’s BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) research program. Professor Vallor's work explores how AI and automation reshape human character, habits, and practices. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, former Visiting Researcher and AI Ethicist at Google, and recipient of the 2026 Barwise Prize from the American Philosophical Association. She is the author of two monographs: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016) and The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2024). 

David Deming is an economist whose work focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market. He holds teaching appointments in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Education, and the Kennedy School of Government, where he serves as the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy. Before being named Danoff Dean of the College, he served as Academic Dean of the Kennedy School. He and his wife Janine served as Co-Faculty Deans of Kirkland House. 

James Mickens is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard's Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). He is a Director of the Berkman Klein Center and was a Principal Investigator at the Applied Social Media Lab, where he led the Transparency Hub, Permissions Explorer, Encrypted Spaces, Advanced Digital Identity (or Keyring) and Fediverse projects. His current research focuses on the performance, security, and robustness of large-scale distributed web services. His research focuses on the performance, security, and robustness of large-scale distributed web services.

For example, his Riverbed project explores how to use trusted hardware and new OS interfaces to allow users to constrain how datacenters manipulate sensitive data.

Mickens received a B.S. degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan. Before coming to Harvard, he spent six years as a researcher at Microsoft, and a semester as a visiting professor at MIT.

He is also the creator of Mickens-do, a martial art so deadly that he refuses to teach it to anyone (including himself).