The board of the Philosophy and Engineering Department has the pleasure of inviting you to Marc Steen's lecture on 15 October next on the topic: Virtue Ethics for Engineers.

We are going to talk about algorithms and AI. These are going to have an impact on our society, and raise all kinds of ethical questions. You, like the speaker, want to contribute to a beautiful, safe, healthy world. So you want ethics in your projects. But how do you do that? You can't add ethics after the fact or shout something from the sidelines.

What can you do? You can cultivate specific virtues; virtues like self-control (instead of feature creep and slippery slope) or humility (instead of blind faith in technology). The speaker shows examples of 'exemplars', people like Tristan Harris, Cathy O'Neil, Jaron Lanier and Sherry Turkle (dearengineerblog.wordpress.com/; inspired by Shannon Vallor). It would be great if you bring in issues from your practice.

About the speaker:
Marc Steen works as a senior researcher at TNO. He studied Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft a long time ago. Less long ago, he did a part-time PhD at the University for Humanistics, and defended it at TU Delft; there his passion for ethics was awakened. In recent years, he has been particularly interested in ethical questions in big data, algorithms and AI. He has recently published several opinion pieces on these: Even algorithms make mistakes (Trouw); Find the plugs on your robots (Volkskrant) and Use artificial intelligence to achieve social goals (FD).

Note: This is on Monday and not Wednesday as usual.