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Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Carissa Véliz, who is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford University. She works on privacy, digital ethics and the ethics of AI, and her new book argues that AI has become the new Oracle of Delphi.

That book is Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future. It is a history of prediction as much as a book about AI — tracing the line from ancient oracles to credit scores, bail algorithms and tech CEOs, and arguing that a prediction is never a neutral forecast but an instrument of power. As she points out in the conversation, for all the thousands of books on how to forecast, nobody had yet written one on the ethics of it.

Carissa is also the author of Privacy Is Power, an Economist book of the year translated into seven languages, and The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance. She is also the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. She has advised the UK and Spanish governments, sits on the board of the Proton Foundation alongside Tim Berners-Lee, and is a member of UNESCO's Women4Ethical AI expert group.

We talk about:

• Is AI the new Oracle of Delphi?
• When a CEO predicts, is it a forecast or an order?
• Obeying in advance
• A prediction can never be a fact
• The turkey’s disappointment at Thanksgiving
• Does polling corrupt democracy?
• Why a self-fulfilling prophecy is the perfect crime
• A blow dryer, a sensor, and what's wrong with prediction markets
• Is AI doing the creative work while we do the boring jobs?

Let's not prophesise!

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