Podcast: The Gradient: Perspectives on AI
Episode: Iason Gabriel: Value Alignment and the Ethics of Advanced AI Systems
Release date: 2025-11-26

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Episode 143

I spoke with Iason Gabriel about:

* Value alignment

* Technology and worldmaking

* How AI systems affect individuals and the social world

You can find him on his website and Twitter/X.

Find me on Twitter (or LinkedIn if you want…) for updates, and reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.

Outline

* (00:00) Intro

* (01:18) Iason’s intellectual development

* (04:28) Aligning language models with human values, democratic civility and agonism

* (08:20) Overlapping consensus, differing norms, procedures for identifying norms

* (13:27) Rawls’ theory of justice, the justificatory and stability problems

* (19:18) Aligning LLMs and cooperation, speech acts, justification and discourse norms, literacy

* (23:45) Actor Network Theory and alignment

* (27:25) Value alignment and Iason’s starting points

* (33:10) The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants, AI’s impacts on social processes and users, personalization

* (37:50) AGI systems and social power

* (39:00) Displays of care and compassion, Machine Love (Joel Lehman)

* (41:30) Virtue ethics, morality and language, virtue in AI systems vs. MacIntyre’s conception in After Virtue

* (45:00) The Challenge of Value Alignment

* (45:25) Technologists as worldmakers

* (51:30) Technological determinism, collective action problems

* (55:25) Iason’s goals with his work

* (58:32) Outro

Links

Papers:

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Iason Gabriel: Value Alignment and the Ethics of Advanced AI Systems

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