Thursday 25th September 2025 - 11am, Margaret Burnett

Speaker: Margaret Burnett (Oregon State University)

Title:  Mission - To enable diverse mere mortals to assess an AI agent's "goodness" for their own needs

Abstract: As AI agents become more and more prevalent in everyday technology, more and more individuals -- from every walk of life, at every level of education, across the entire socioeconomic spectrum, of every gender, race, ethnicity and age -- will need to make decisions about which agent(s) to use, when and how, and to what extent using them is the best path forward. 

The "mission" this talk explores is how we can enable such diverse individuals to make such decisions in ways that make their lives better instead of worse. For example, should I use an agent to enable me to be a remote caregiver for my grandmother, or should I move in with her? Should I buy semi-self-driving car X, or semi-self-driving car Y, or stay entirely manual? Will using one of these systems cost someone's life? Will it so destroy someone's privacy that their lives become filled with fear and harassment? Will my child become less intelligent over time if I give her access to LLM-powered "homework helpers”? 

In this talk, I don't show to how to answer any of these questions. But I show a few paths forward that may point to way(s) toward answering them, and at least one path on how not to answer them.