Artificial Intelligence is Not Intelligent: Why AI is a New Form of Agency, and Why This Matters
About the event
We have always assumed that acting intelligently requires being intelligent. Artificial intelligence dismantles this assumption. In this lecture, Professor Floridi will argue that AI is best understood not as a new form of intelligence but as a radically new kind of agency: systems that act effectively, solve problems, shape outcomes, and carry significant consequences, without any understanding, intention, or genuine reasoning. What we have achieved is a decoupling of successful agency from intelligence. This shift matters for design, governance, and regulation, both ethically and legally. Rather than debating whether AI 'really' thinks, Floridi suggests we ask: what kind of agents are these systems, and what does their growing presence demand of us?
About the speaker
Luciano Floridi is the John K. Castle Professor in the Practice of Cognitive Science and the Founding Director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University. Before joining Yale, he was the OII Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford. He has published more than 300 works on the philosophy of information, digital ethics, the ethics of AI, and the philosophy of technology. His most recent books are The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: Principles, Challenges, and Opportunities (OUP, 2023) and The Green and The Blue: Naive Ideas to Improve Politics in the Digital Age (Wiley, 2023). His works have been translated into many languages. Read More>>
About the commentator
Kati Kish Bar-On is a philosopher of science and social science with interest in the dynamics of group behavior and its influence on individual actions and scientific progress. Her research integrates insights from social psychology, behavioral sciences, and political philosophy to examine the interplay between groups, norms, emotions, and social identities. Currently, she is an Alfred P. Sloan Meta-Science and AI postdoctoral fellow at Boston University, visiting scholar at Harvard Business School, and lecturer at Northeastern University. Read More>>