is pleased to announce the first talk in its inaugural online speaker series:
A Dilemma for Skeptics of Trustworthy AI
Madeleine Ransom and Nicole Menard
with commentary by Susan Dieleman
Wednesday, November 5th, 2025 / 3:00 – 4:30 PM Eastern (Zoom)
While numerous AI ethics guidelines provide criteria for developing trustworthy AI, a growing number of philosophers argue that AI cannot be trustworthy because AI lack some human feature deemed essential for the trust relation, such as moral agency or being responsive to reasons. Here we propose a dilemma for these skeptics. Either such theorists must hold there is either only one kind of trust (monism), or that there are multiple varieties of trust (pluralism). The first horn of the dilemma is that a monistic view of trust is implausible; no one analysis can capture all kinds of trust relationships. The second horn of the dilemma is that if such theorists adopt a pluralistic account
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Drew Inkpen is an Associate Professor at Mount Allison University in the Department of Philosophy, an Associate Fellow in the History of Science and Technology Programme at the University of King’s College, and Secretary-Treasurer for the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Science. He writes about issues that span the history and philosophy of the life sciences and medicine, with particular interests in the natural-artificial distinction and in microbiome science. He recently co-authored the book Can Microbial Communities Regenerate? with the University of Chicago Press.
Regina Rini holds the Canada Research Chair in Social Reasoning and teaches in the philosophy department at York University. Her research draws upon the philosophical disciplines of ethics and epistemology to illuminate the social effects of new technology. In addition to her many scholarly works, she writes a regular column for the Times Literary Supplement. She is currently writing a book about the role of epistemology in democratic control of science and politics.
Dr. Geoffrey Martin Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta. He presently holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute.
He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and has published on subjects such as artificial intelligence and ethics, philosophical dialogue, textual visualization and analysis, digital humanities, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia.
His books include Defining Dialogue: From Socrates to the Internet (Humanity Books, 2003) and Hermeneutica, co-authored with Stéfan Sinclair (MIT Press, 2016). Hermeneutica is part of a hybrid text and tool project with Voyant Tools (voyant-tools.org), an award-winning suite of analytical tools. He recently co-edited Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (Open Book Publishers, 2021) and On Making in the Digital Humanities (UCL Press, 2023).
Joshua August (Gus) Skorburg is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Academic Co-Director of the Centre for Advancing Responsible and Ethical Artificial Intelligence (CARE-AI), and Faculty Affiliate at the One Health Institute at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. From 2018-2022 he was Adjunct Professor in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
He received his PhD in Philosophy in 2017 from the University of Oregon. His research spans topics in applied ethics and moral psychology.
Dr. Karina Vold is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She is also a Research Lead at the U of T Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, an AI2050 Early Career Fellow with the Schmidt Sciences Foundation, a Faculty Associate at the U of T Centre for Ethics, and an Associate Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
She specialises in Philosophy of Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, with research interested in cognitive enhancement, human autonomy, and the ethics and safety of AI.
David Bourget is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western University and the Executive Director of the PhilPapers Foundation. He specializes in the philosophy of mind and digital philosophy.
His research spans a wide range of topics, including the role of consciousness in the mind, the metaphysics of intentionality and consciousness, the impact of information technology on philosophy, and the prospects for artificial minds.
Kino Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University.
She works primarily in the philosophy of statistical methodologies employed in the social/behavioural sciences. She also works in the philosophy of data and philosophy of machine learning.
Alice is an assistant professor and the Duncanson Chair in Ethics and Technology at Western University. Before that, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and received my PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto.
I work primarily in the ethics of machine learning and social formal epistemology. My projects fall into two broad categories. The first kind of project connects formal results in artificial intelligence research to ethical issues related to interpretability, collaboration and fairness.
The second kind of project uses formal and computational models to investigate pressing issues in our social discourse today, such as questions about misinformation, scientific practices and polarization.
Catherine Stinson is the Queen’s National Scholar in the Philosophical Implications of Artificial Intelligence and Assistant Professor in Computing and Philosophy at Queen’s University. Previous positions include postdocs at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, as well as Senior Policy Associate at the Mowat Centre, University of Toronto.
With graduate training in both machine learning and philosophy of science, plus experience in community arts organizing and policy, Dr. Stinson brings multiple perspectives to the study of AI. The research in their Ethics & Technology Lab includes methodological analyses of AI research, data-drivensociological studies of AI as a field, commentaries on ethical issues in AI, technical support for data justice initiatives, examinations of generative AI art, and empirical work in socially-conscious AI. To learn more about their work, visit https://etlab.cs.queensu.ca/
Madeleine Ransom is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus.
She works on learning, bias, and expertise. Much of her current research is on the value of human expertise in the face of AI ‘experts’ and how human expertise can contribute to both individual wellbeing and a flourishing society. She is also involved in an interdisciplinary project on trustworthy AI through her membership in the Digital Transparency Research Excellence Cluster. Ransom is also a faculty associate at the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, Wellbeing, and Ethics.
Nicholas Dunn is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lethbridge and a Research Fellow in the Critical Thinking and Citizen Engagement Lab. His current research examines the relationship between human judgment and artificial intelligence, as well as the impact of AI on critical thinking.
Martina Orlandi is an Assistant Professor in the Applied Artificial Intelligence Program at Trent University Durham.
