Adriano Mannino's research interests are in normative ethics, decision theory, political theory, and applied ethics, especially AI ethics and policy. His Ph.D. dissertation, "Playing Dice with Lives: An Essay on Aggregation, Rights, and Automation," examines the moral "numbers problem" through the lenses of moral philosophy, decision theory, and social choice. In other academic and practical work (as a social entrepreneur and policy consultant), Mannino has dealt with issues including climate change and collective action, animal ethics and politics, public health and medical resource allocation, neuroenhancement, democratic discourse in the digital public sphere (and populist/authoritarian threats to it), as well as artificial intelligence.
At the Kavli Center, Mannino will investigate normative issues that bear on the potential moral agency and patienthood of advanced AI systems. E.g.: Should human principals who delegate moral decisions to AI agents take the agents' ex post perspective or judge matters from their own ex ante perspective? When AI systems constitute forms of governance, should they be instructed to optimize a specific axiological function, or be focused on respecting a set of individual rights? How might advanced AI systems shape the future of our societies and species? Will suitably complex AIs come up for moral and legal status themselves, and what would this imply for long-term distributive justice and population ethics?
