Care Ethics in the Age of AI: An Interview with Dr. Peter Asaro

For those who have read my other reflections from my early years of college, this line may sound repetitive, but it bears repeating because its true: my high school debate experience continues to pay dividends in my college experience. While interning with the Tech Policy Lab in Summer 2022, one of my tasks was to help organize WeRobot, an internationally-attended tech policy conference. At the conference, I was surprised to run into Dr. Asaro, a leading philosopher of technology who is at the forefront of efforts to ban lethal autonomous weapons--the very topic that I debated in senior year of high school. As such, I was already familiar with Dr. Asaro's work, and even cited him a few times in my high school debate cases. Ryan Calo, co-director of the Tech Policy Lab, was kind enough to introduce me to Dr. Asaro, although I left without thinking that I would speak much to him again.

The spring quarter following the conference, I was an officer in the Philosophy Society at UW--a now defunct club that organized philosophy-related talks. Racking my brain for speakers I could invite, I remembered meeting Dr. Asaro and reached out to ask him if he would be interested in giving a talk. By a stroke of luck, Dr. Asaro let me know that he would actually be a visiting scholar at the UW Center for an Informed Public that autumn, so we decided to postpone the talk to then.

When Autumn 2023 came around, the Philosophy Society was sadly disbanded, but I had joined The Garden of Ideas, UW's undergraduate philosophy journal as an editor. I reached back out to Dr. Asaro to propose that we turn the talk into an interview to publish in the journal, and he agreed. Working with Molly Banks, another editor studying philosophy and informatics, we read through Dr. Asaro's work and prepared questions for an hour-long interview in-person interview with him.

Molly and I Interviewing Dr. Peter Asaro

The interview was a success, with many UW students attending and asking their own questions. We started by covering his latest work about care ethics and predictive policing, and extended themes from that work to other topics like lethal autonomous weapons, democracy, and consciousness. The interview was then published in the Autumn 2023 issue of The Garden of Ideas, which you can read below:

7 - Dr. Asaro - GOI Autumn 2023.pdf

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I learned a lot from talking to Dr. Asaro, and the ideas from our interview continue to influence the way I view technology and ethics today. For example, in a recent class project for CSE 582 (Ethics in AI), I cited Dr. Asaro's work and applied a care ethics framework to analyze my own work for the Center for Human Rights. After the interview, I even met with Dr. Asaro for a coffee chat, where I learned that Dr. Asaro pursued PhDs in both computer science and philosophy (but ultimately only graduated with a PhD in philosophy and an MS in computer science). Dr. Asaro also recommended I apply to the BS/MS program in CS at UW because it sounded like it could provide a great value at a low cost--a recommendation that I ultimately ended up acting on.