Inaugural Lecture with Professor Sylvie Delacroix
About this Event
The Inaugural Lectures are a celebration of our Professors, as they present an overview of their contribution to their field, as well as highlight its latest developments. The lecture is open to both members of the university community and the wider public, and is followed by a reception in the Great Hall.
'The Black Holes of Ethical Life: Habit, Critical Agency and the Design of Digital Worlds.'
We like to think of ourselves as the authors of our choices, weighing options and deciding freely. Yet most of what lets us act well in the world happens beneath conscious awareness, in the habits that let us read a room, a patient, a page. These habits are the black holes of our ethical life: we rarely see them directly, only infer them from how we behave.
This lecture argues that our capacity for critical agency is not a fixed possession but a fragile achievement. It rests on habits of thought and perception remaining supple enough to be interrogated. That suppleness is not guaranteed. It can be worn away, and today it is being reshaped at unprecedented scale by the digital environments we inhabit.
Drawing on 25 years of work in the philosophy of law and ethics, I ask what it takes for critical agency to flourish rather than rigidify, and why this question belongs at the centre of how we design our digital infrastructure. The stakes are practical. If the capabilities underpinning critical agency are cultivated rather than simply given, then the shape of our environments is never ethically neutral, and neither is our silence about how they are built.
I will close with a call to a more demanding kind of AI ethics, one prepared to get its hands dirty. I will highlight some of the work underway at the Centre for Data Futures, where we are building interfaces that give communities a reason to keep refining how uncertainty is expressed by the systems they rely on. The point is not, in the first instance, to improve the systems, welcome though that is. It is to keep alive the human normative practices through which a community decides what matters to it.
Professor Sylvie Delacroix
Sylvie Delacroix holds the inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law at King's College London, where she directs the Centre for Data Futures, and is a visiting professor at Tohoku University. Her research explores critical agency: the factors that shape our ability to question the status quo and imagine alternative futures. This spans the role of habit in ethical agency, the social sustainability of the data ecosystems underpinning generative AI, bottom-up data empowerment, machine learning interpretability, professional responsibility, and (her current focus) how groups of professionals can iteratively refine how large language models communicate uncertainty.
Her commitment to developing participatory infrastructure led to the world's first data trusts pilots (enabling groups to pool data rights through a trustee), and to King's Data Empowerment Clinic, which she launched to tackle what she calls the missing profession of the 21st century. It has also shaped her contributions to public policy, including service on the Law Society's Public Policy Commission on algorithm use in the justice system.
Her current work on agency-enhancing, participatory infrastructure and the communication of uncertainty in LLMs deployed in morally-loaded contexts is funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Previously, her research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the NHS, Omidyar Network, Mozilla Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust, from whom she received the Leverhulme Prize. Her latest book, Habitual Ethics? (Bloomsbury, 2022, open-access), was the subject of a symposium in Jurisprudence. She is a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College.
Agenda
🕑: 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Lecture
🕑: 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Drinks reception
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
