Oxford Studies in Philosophy of AI and Computing

Seth Lazar, Jeffrey Howard, Rachel Sterken

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, at its core, a deeply philosophical enterprise. And the rise of highly capable general-purpose AI systems is reshaping our societies and our self-understanding in ways that demand philosophical scrutiny.

Overview

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of AI and Computing (OSPAIC), our annual volume, will galvanise an emerging subfield that both harnesses philosophy to steer the AI revolution, and uses AI advances to inspire first-order progress in philosophy itself.

We can’t focus only on the models themselves, but we also mustn’t focus only on the wider system—for example, many of the most significant AI risks come from pre-deployment systems. We have to put today’s AI progress in context, but we must also recognise what has genuinely changed. We are in a period of acute transition; we must understand what brought us here, but to navigate the transition safely, we have to understand the transition on its own terms, not pattern-match to earlier technologies with which it is fundamentally discontinuous.

Philosophers of mind and cognitive science, as well as logicians, have always cared about and contributed to first-order progress in AI. Recently, however, almost every other philosophical subfield has recognised both the urgency of deploying their expertise to help society navigate radical technological change, and the deep and visceral way in which rapid AI progress calls fundamental tenets of their theories into question. Until recently, only humanity could lay claim to a broad suite of higher cognitive faculties—from sophisticated language use, to a deep understanding of the world, to moral reasoning and beyond. LLMs have reached comparable or superior performance in these domains by an entirely different route. Meanwhile, continuing AI progress could force us to revisit some of the basic empirical and conceptual premises of our most widely-held philosophical theories. Philosophers of language, epistemologists, and value theorists alike must also respond.

The call is being answered.

Philosophers are exploring these issues in a rich, exciting, and growing body of work, being published across a range of major journals. OSPAIC aims to be the capstone venue that inspires and coalesces the best work in philosophy of AI and computing, both galvanising this growing subfield, and projecting its influence into the broader debates that are reshaping our world.

Background and Aims

The demand for a flagship venue focused on the philosophy of AI and computing is shaped by three sources: philosophy itself; the technical and empirical disciplines building the AI transition; and society at large.

Computer scientists in particular—including those at the world’s leading AI companies—are increasingly confronting deep philosophical questions without adequate resources to navigate them. Questions of the nature of understanding, the possibility of digital sentience, and the content and justification of moral constraints are now of pressing operational concern to many researchers at the frontier of AI science.

These three constituencies—analytic philosophers, the broader research community, society at large—create desiderata that could in principle conflict. Philosophical rigour and innovation is our first priority, since that alone will attract the best philosophers to publish in our volumes. Our second is deep and serious empirical and technical grounding, which will facilitate interdisciplinary exchanges. Our third is wider accessibility. Essays should aspire to be accessible to a non-specialist audience; but where the technical nature of the discussion renders this infeasible, we will facilitate the provision of non-technical abstracts that explain key results.

Scope

OSPAIC will welcome research on all philosophical questions raised by AI and computing.

Criteria. OSPAIC will publish work that is philosophically rigorous and innovative, while being technically- and empirically-grounded, and either inherently accessible to non-philosophical audiences, or accompanied by explanatory material that is. “Technical and empirical grounding” means: papers must be informed by the state of the art in research on AI itself, and on its societal impacts.

Editors

Seth Lazar

Executive Editor

Seth Lazar is a Professor in the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University, and a Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He also holds honorary positions as a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a Distinguished Research Fellow of the University of Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI. He was previously a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google DeepMind. He leads the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab, where he works on the philosophy of computing and AI governance. He has published extensively in leading philosophy journals (Ethics, Noûs, Philosophy & Public Affairs, and others) and gave the 2023 Tanner Lecture on AI and Human Values at Stanford University. His leadership roles include chairing the ACM Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Conference and the AAAI/ACM AI, Ethics and Society Conference, as well as editing numerous journal special issues and edited volumes, and one Oxford Handbook. He is currently an Associate Editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs and an editor of The Alignment Journal.

Jeffrey Howard

Associate Editor

Jeffrey Howard is Professor of Political Philosophy & Public Policy at University College London. He currently directs the Digital Speech Lab, which integrates moral and political philosophy with the social and computational sciences to produce guidance on the governance of online speech. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, and he has advised teams at Meta and Ofcom, the UK regulator of social media companies. His book on free speech in the digital age is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. His work has been published or is forthcoming in many venues including Philosophy & Public Affairs, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Law & Philosophy, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, British Academy Rising Star, and UKRI Future Leader Fellow. He earned his DPhil at Oxford and AB at Harvard.

Rachel Sterken

Associate Editor

Rachel Sterken is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where she holds research affiliations with the AI & Humanity Lab and the Institute of Data Science. Her work in philosophy of language actively seeks interdisciplinary connections, addressing topics such as generic generalizations, conceptual engineering, fake news, platform- and AI-mediated communication, and manipulation, appearing in leading disciplinary journals such as Philosophers’ Imprint, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Philosophical Perspectives. She was the Principal Investigator for the “Meaning and Communication in the Information Age” project (2020-2025), which examines the evolution of language and communication in response to information technologies, and co-director of “Concept Lab” (2016-2022), fostering collaborative research on conceptual engineering. At HKU, she oversees the Masters in AI, Ethics, and Society programme and the dual-degree in Computer Science and Humanities.