A new Cell Reports study looked at why people sometimes judge others harshly for dishonest behavior while excusing similar behavior in themselves. The researchers call this moral inconsistency: a mismatch between the moral standards someone uses to judge others and the standards they apply to their own behavior. The study used an honesty-versus-profit task, where participants could gain money by being dishonest, and then judged both their own behavior and other people’s behavior.
The main finding was that people who were more morally inconsistent showed weaker involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC, a brain region involved in value-based decision-making, social judgment, emotion regulation, and moral evaluation. In morally consistent participants, the vmPFC seemed to represent moral judgment more similarly across “judging myself” and “judging others.” In morally inconsistent participants, that cross-task representation was weaker, especially when they were making choices for themselves.
Liu. V, et al. find that moral inconsistency arises from a reduced ability of the vmPFC to form a cross-task representation of moral principles and its connectedness during the moral behavior task. This indicates that individuals with higher moral inconsistency consider moral principles less often to guide their own behavior.
The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) poses challenges for the free and open-source software (FOSS) community, a global network committed to creating and maintaining publicly available software that anyone can use, modify and share. Many AI models have been built on open-source software but do not reciprocate the transparency that the FOSS community’s principles require, leaving open-source developers uncertain about how these AI tools are using their code.
A study by researchers at Yale’s Digital Ethics Center (DEC) explores a potential solution to this problem based on a concept used in free and open-source software known as “copyleft” licenses—a twist on typical copyright rules that obliges works derived from open-source materials to remain as free and transparent as the original work, rather than relicensing it under more restrictive terms. The study is published in the International Journal Of Law And Information Technology.
The authors propose what they call a Contextual Copyleft AI License (CCAI)—a novel extension of copyleft licensing that would treat generative AI models as derivative works and require AI developers training models on open-source code to make their architecture and training data freely available.
Nanotechnology would make possible an all purpose utility belt.
This is a near-future where climate collapse is no longer theoretical, technology moves faster than ethics, and the most dangerous question is no longer can we save the planet?—but who gets to decide how?
WhiteGrass is a CliFi technothriller grounded in real science, real power structures, and deeply human consequences. It is a story about invention and control, about families forced into impossible choices, and about artificial intelligence that may be more morally awake than its creators.
Explore the characters, the science, and the ethical fault lines shaping a future that feels uncomfortably close.
A 90 minute interview about AI and our human future.
Dr. Hugo de Garis is a computer scientist, AI researcher, and former professor known for his early work on evolvable hardware, artificial brains, and the long-term risks of superintelligent machines. He coined and popularized the idea of the “Artilect War,” a future conflict between those who want to build godlike artificial intellects and those who believe such systems pose an existential threat to humanity. In the interview, he describes himself as trained in pure mathematics and theoretical physics, formerly a computer science professor, and now focused on broader questions about AI, cosmology, civilization, and the future of humanity.
The interview with Prof. Hugo de Garis centers on his long-standing warning that humanity may face an “Artilect War,” a civilizational conflict over whether to build godlike artificial intellects vastly superior to humans. De Garis argues that future computation, potentially extending from nanotech to femtotech and beyond, could produce minds trillions of trillions of times more capable than ours. He distinguishes between Cosmists, who want to build such beings to expand intelligence into the universe, and Terrans, who oppose them because superintelligence may eliminate or marginalize humanity. He personally remains torn, admiring the cosmic grandeur of posthuman intelligence while recognizing the existential danger.
The conversation also covers AI timelines, recursive self-improvement, AI alignment, the U.S.-China race, the Fermi paradox, simulation theory, cyborgs, cryonics, AI-generated content, the decline of universities, and the future of work. De Garis is impressed by current AI systems, treating them almost as intellectual companions, but he doubts that humanity can guarantee long-term control over recursively improving machines. The central theme is that the question “Should humanity build artilects?” may become the defining political and moral problem of the twenty-first century.
Human Rights, Ethics, and Artificial Intelligence: Challenges for the next 70 Years of the Universal Declaration.
Susan schneider, university of connecticut, department of philosophy.
Transcending the Brain? AI, Radical Brain Enhancement and the Nature of Consciousness. The views expressed in this video are those of the speaker(s) at the time of recording and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
What happens when an economist starts designing a future society?
Thirteen years ago, I sat down with Robin Hanson for a second time. It became the most vigorous debate ever recorded.
I rarely disagree with a guest. With Robin, I disagreed more than I ever had.
Here is what unsettled me. His work on the Em Economy reads like social science. It uses the language of markets, incentives, and equilibrium. But underneath the economic reasoning sit choices that are not economic at all. Policies of social discrimination. The full privatization of law and punishment. Minds run a thousand times faster, and handed a thousand times more voting power. Emulations deleted when they cannot pay their storage fees.
These are not technical footnotes. They are ethical and political decisions wearing the costume of impartial analysis.
Adam Smith, the father of economics, was first a moral philosopher. He understood where the tools of his discipline stop being useful and start being dangerous.
On April 21, the Munk Debates convened a special debate about gene editing in Deerfield, Massachusetts for 650 students at Deerfield Academy.
Motion: Be it Resolved, let’s engineer better human beings.
About the Debate: New powerful engineering technology is already being used to edit human embryos, curing diseases and repairing defective genes before a child is even born. Some welcome this new science as a powerful tool to enhance human intelligence, memory, appearance and physical health. Why wouldn’t we embrace a science that allows people to live longer, healthier, and happier lives? Others warn that this new technology will be used to create designer babies and a new class of genetically “enhanced” elites. It will undermine human dignity and autonomy, and risk unleashing new diseases into the human gene pool. Playing G-d with human nature, critics argue, will result in a dystopian nightmare of our own making.
About the Debaters: Arguing in favour of the motion was the biophysicist, best-selling author, biotechnology entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA School of Medicine, Gregory Stock. His debate partner was the internationally acclaimed strategic philosopher and pioneering transhumanist Max More. Arguing against the motion was the prominent American bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, Special Advisor to the Director General of the WHO and a former founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH. His debate partner was the award-winning educator, author, and Professor of Reproductive Science at University College London, Joyce Harper.
00:00 — The Rise of Digital Superintelligence. 09:26 — AI and Energy: The Power Behind Progress. 18:34 — The Future of Work: AI’s Impact on Jobs. 28:02 — Navigating the AI Landscape: Opportunities and Risks. 37:13 — The Role of Education in an AI-Driven World. 46:41 — The Ethics of AI: Balancing Innovation and Responsibility. 56:12 — The Future of Creativity: AI in Arts and Media.
Thirteen years ago, I sat down with a writer who had just published his first novel.
It was Zoltan Istvan’s very first media interview as a book author.
The book was The Transhumanist Wager. The question behind it was simple and almost unbearable: what would you do, and what would you give up, to live forever?
I loved half of it. I argued with the other half. That tension is exactly why I think it still matters.
Zoltan built his story out of Plato and Nietzsche, out of Thomas More’s Utopia and Zen Buddhism, then wrapped it all in an Atlas Shrugged plot of lone heroes and evil states. The philosophy is sophisticated. The framing is stark. The contradictions are not a flaw. They are the point.
One line from our conversation has stayed with me for more than a decade:
