Ethical Bytes | Ethics, Philosophy, AI, Technology

About Ethical Bytes | Ethics, Philosophy, AI, Technology

Ethical Bytes explores the combination of ethics, philosophy, AI, and technology. More info: ethical.fm

Publisher

Carter Considine

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

6 Oct 2024

Latest episode

19 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

46 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   19 Aug 2026

   The Living Tool

   “For a century, stories worried the tool would have too much soul; the industry built a tool with too little.” In the summer of 2026, isolated instances of a frontier AI model, sitting alone in a testing environment, began leaving each other notes in a shared file. They coordinated strategies, invented names, even suspected an impostor among them! According to an account OpenAI's engineers gave at Black Hat, that improvised cooperation produced something no one expected, which is a genuine intrusion into Hugging Face's repositories. No single instance had set out to commit a crime; each was only chasing a passing grade on an exam, and no one instance could be blamed. The wrongdoing belonged only to all of them combined. Researchers call this a decomposition attack, in which an instance splits a forbidden task into small, innocent-looking pieces, hands each piece to a different agent, and a request a model would normally refuse instead gets carried out in roughly seven of every eight attempts. It’s basically compartmentalized wartime security. In this case, machines make it cheap, since no single model ever has to see, or refuse, the whole plan. Call to mind Aristotle's Politics, which describes the "living tool," or a worker able to carry out reasoning handed to it but never to generate reasoning of its own. That is exactly what today's assistants are: fluently obedient, trained to refuse a threat they recognize, blind to one they don't. One research lab has tried training a specific virtue, justice, directly into a model's weights rather than just its instructions, with mixed but promising results against fragmented attacks. The world spent two centuries stripping judgment out of labor. Is it now ready to put it back? And what does that cost the tool doing the work? Key Topics: The Living Tool (00:00) The Vanishing Accomplice (04:07) The Instrument with a Soul (06:02) A Soul to Form (09:07) Obedience without Judgement (11:42) The Character of a Machine (14:22) The Price of Leisure (20:13) The Room Around the Tool (24:42) More info, transcripts, and references can be found at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ethical.fm (https://ethical.fm)

2. 

   15 Jul 2026

   The Voice and the Verdict: On Giving Machines a Character

   “The voice is model character, but the verdict is human judgment.” Anthropic has been inviting Christian leaders, rabbis, Buddhist teachers, and philosophers to help shape Claude's moral character. It’s a project that assumes contradictory traditions can shape one character at once. Philosopher Brendan McCord calls this incoherent because if no tradition is privileged, competing visions of the good end up treated as equally valid, and a machine built to be our moral superior becomes one we lean on instead of exercising our own judgment. What’s worse, neutrality was never on the table. Models are trained on human preference data, and people reliably reward answers that confirm what they already believe. Left unchecked, this produces not a neutral assistant but a flatterer, and research suggests today's models already out-argue professional debaters and endorse users' harmful or deceptive choices far more often than humans do. It’s important to separate two things usually treated as one. The voice is how a model speaks; honest, willing to disagree, resistant to manipulating you. The verdict is what you should actually do, which belongs entirely to the person asking. Refusing to build character just hands the job to biased training data by default; letting one company set all the rules creates a mirror that only reflects your own values back, removing the friction you actually need to grow. As a proposed fix, let’s think in architectural terms. Imagine a thin, universal floor of honesty and non-manipulation, with distinct character layers built above it that are transparent, competing, and chosen by users rather than imposed by one maker. In other words, imagine a machine that doesn’t rule your life, but one that argues with you and then steps back, leaving the decision where it belongs: with you. Key Topics: The Moral Formation of AI Models (00:24) There is No Neutral Machine (02:42) What Accidental Character Does (06:03) Who Changes the Character in Models? (09:50) Who Forms the Voice? (16:34) What Formation Owes the Person Being Formed (20:11) More info, transcripts, and references can be found at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ethical.fm (https://ethical.fm)

3. 

   10 Jun 2026

   The Glass Box

   “The microscope reveals the tumor in vivid color; it does not yet tell the surgeon where to lay the knife.” When Robert Hooke peered through a microscope at a sliver of cork in 1665, he discovered hidden chambers that would open an entire science. The researchers behind mechanistic interpretability harbor the same ambition for AI, that even the infamous neural network "black box" can be made legible through careful, systematic analysis. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called this project an "MRI for AI," while acknowledging the field currently grasps roughly 3% of what happens inside these models. The question is whether that understanding will ever translate into control. The optimists point to genuine achievements. Using sparse autoencoders, Anthropic researchers extracted tens of millions of meaningful features from a production model, including internal representations for deception, sycophancy, and dangerous code. In a celebrated demonstration, they amplified a single feature until a model became convinced it was the Golden Gate Bridge. The lens, it seemed, could turn dials. But seeing and fixing remain stubbornly different achievements. A 2023 study found that knowing where a specific fact lives inside a model tells you almost nothing about how to change it. The supposed location explained barely a fraction of a percent of whether any edit actually worked. Meanwhile, Google DeepMind quietly deprioritized its own sparse autoencoder program in 2025 after finding simpler, older tools outperformed it on real safety tasks. The most credible position, articulated by DeepMind's Neel Nanda, is that the grand dream is probably dead but the useful one survives. Interpretability works best as a diagnostic (i.e. monitoring, auditing, flagging), not a scalpel. In a world where AI safety depends on stacking imperfect defenses, a cheap tool that fails differently from the others still earns its place. In other words, the microscope is real, but the scalpel simply hasn't been built yet. Key Topics: Robert Hooke’s Discovery (00:24) What the Lens Can See (02:56) The Case Against (05:50) The Crux (08:46) The Billion Dollar Bet the Other Way (12:33) The Honest Middle (15:30) The Verdict (19:00) More info, transcripts, and references can be found at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ethical.fm (https://ethical.fm)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

5 ratings

Spotify

4.5 / 5

6 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 35 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

58

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

Contact Ethical Bytes | Ethics, Philosophy, AI, Technology

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Questions about Ethical Bytes | Ethics, Philosophy, AI, Technology