Date: September 19, 2025 (Friday)
Time: 14:00 – 17:00
Venue: Room 4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Speaker:
Geoff Keeling, Staff Research Scientist, Google
Winnie Street, Senior Researcher, Google
Abstract:
A symposium on the forthcoming book “AI Welfare” by Geoff Keeling and Winnie Street. This is an examination of whether—and which—AI systems could be welfare subjects and why that matters. Core topics include: the nature and moral significance of welfare; how to interpret behavioural “evidence” from AI (and guard against anthropomorphism and debunking explanations); candidate bearers of welfare among models, characters, and agents; plausible grounds of AI welfare (consciousness, sentience, agency, personhood, souls, and relational standing); and practical ethics and policy, from precautionary approaches and distress monitoring to research, institutional preparedness, and representation. The event opens with an introduction by Geoff Keeling and Winnie Street, followed by critical replies from Boris Babic, Hua Shen, Nate Sharadin, Herman Cappelen, and Simon Goldstein, and concludes with open discussio
