Derek Leben: All of Us are Going to Become Ethicists
Release Date: 10/09/2025
Brad Carson: Sharing AI's Bounty
The Road to Accountable AI
Former Congressman and Pentagon official Brad Carson discusses his organization, Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI), which seeks to bridge the gap between immediate AI harms like and catastrophic safety risks, while bringing deep Capitol Hill expertise to the AI conversation . He argues that unlike previous innovations such as electricity or the automobile, AI has been deeply unpopular with the public from the start, creating a rare bipartisan alignment among those skeptical of its power and impacts. This creates openings for productive discussions about AI policy. Drawing on his...
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Oliver Patel: Sharing Frameworks for AI Governance
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Oliver Patel has built a sizeable online following for his social media posts and Substack about enterprise AI governance, using clever acronyms and visual frameworks to distill down insights based on his experience at AstraZeneca, a major global pharmaceutical company. In this episode, he details his career journey from academic theory to government policy and now practical application, and offers insights for those new to the field. He argues that effective enterprise AI governance requires being pragmatic and picking your battles, since the role isn't to stop AI adoption but to enable...
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The Road to Accountable AI
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Derek Leben: All of Us are Going to Become Ethicists
The Road to Accountable AI
Carnegie Mellon business ethics professor Derek Leben joins Kevin Werbach to trace how AI ethics evolved from an early focus on embodied systems—industrial robots, drones, self-driving cars—to today’s post-ChatGPT landscape that demands concrete, defensible recommendations for companies. Leben explains why fairness is now central: firms must decide which features are relevant to a task (e.g., lending or hiring) and reject those that are irrelevant—even if they’re predictive. Drawing on philosophers such as John Rawls and Michael Sandel, he argues for objective judgments about a...
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Heather Domin: From Principles to Practice
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Kevin Werbach interviews Heather Domin, Global Head of the Office of Responsible AI and Governance at HCLTech. Domin reflects on her path into AI governance, including her pioneering work at IBM to establish foundational AI ethics practices. She discusses how the field has grown from a niche concern to a recognized profession, and the importance of building cross-functional teams that bring together technologists, lawyers, and compliance experts. Domin emphasizes the advances in governance tools, bias testing, and automation that are helping developers and organizations keep pace with rapidly...
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David Hardoon: You Can't Outsource Accountability
The Road to Accountable AI
Kevin Werbach interviews David Hardoon, Global Head of AI Enablement at Standard Chartered Bank and former Chief Data Officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), about the evolving practice of responsible AI. Hardoon reflects on his perspective straddling both government and private-sector leadership roles, from designing the landmark FEAT principles at MAS to embedding AI enablement inside global financial institutions. Hardoon explains the importance of justifiability, a concept he sees as distinct from ethics or accountability. Organizations must not only justify their AI use to...
info_outlineCarnegie Mellon business ethics professor Derek Leben joins Kevin Werbach to trace how AI ethics evolved from an early focus on embodied systems—industrial robots, drones, self-driving cars—to today’s post-ChatGPT landscape that demands concrete, defensible recommendations for companies. Leben explains why fairness is now central: firms must decide which features are relevant to a task (e.g., lending or hiring) and reject those that are irrelevant—even if they’re predictive. Drawing on philosophers such as John Rawls and Michael Sandel, he argues for objective judgments about a system’s purpose and qualifications. Getting practical about testing for AI fairness, he distinguishes blunt outcome checks from better metrics, and highlights counterfactual tools that reveal whether a feature actually drives decisions. With regulations uncertain, he urges companies to treat ethics as navigation, not mere compliance: Make and explain principled choices (including how you mitigate models), accept that everything you do is controversial, and communicate trade-offs honestly to customers, investors, and regulators. In the end, Leben argues, we all must become ethicists to address the issues AI raises...whether we want to or not.
Derek Leben is Associate Teaching Professor of Ethics at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches courses such as “Ethics of Emerging Technologies,” “Fairness in Business,” and “Ethics & AI.” Leben is the author of Ethics for Robots (Routledge, 2018) and AI Fairness (MIT Press, 2025). He founded the consulting group Ethical Algorithms, through which he advises governments and corporations on how to build fair, socially responsible frameworks for AI and autonomous
AI Fairness: Designing Equal Opportunity Algorithms (MIT Press 2025)
Ethics for Robots: How to Design a Moral Algorithm (Routledge 2019)
The Ethical Challenges of AI Agents (Blog post, 2025)