MARKUS FURENDAL

​The social and ethical impact of Artificial Intelligence

I am interested in issues related to AI governance and the ethics of AI. Specifically, I pursue questions such as how the benefits and burdens created by increasingly capable AI ought to be distributed, and what it takes for AI governance to be democratically legitimate. My contributions to this field try to bring insights from theorizing about distributive justice and democratic theory to bear on the concrete problems and possibilities that transformative AI brings with it.

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Beginning in 2024, I am part of a research project on automated decision making in the public sector, based at the Institute for Futures Studies, and a project on democracy and the global governance of AI, based at Stockholm University. Before that, I was a postdoc in a similar research project, which asks what the key features of emerging international AI regimes are, how the nature of the evolving regimes can be explained, and what the implications of these regimes are for justice and democracy.

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I am currently co-editing an edited volume on the global governance of AI, and have previously convened two panels focused on "Governing AI" at the 2023 and the 2021 Mancept Workshops, respectively. In the fall of 2024, I co-organized a workshop on the global governance of AI in Stockholm.

I also try to contribute to the public discussion on political philosophical issues.

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Egalitarianism and the Future of Work

I am also interested in the political philosophy of work and the impact AI may have on work. I have co-organized a conference in Rotterdam on the future of work together with Huub Brouwer (Tilburg),  Willem van der Deijl (Tilburg), and Nicholas Vrousalis (Erasmus). More information is available in the CfA. We organized a similar conference at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, in May 2021. Papers from the conferences were published as a special issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy in 2024 (Vol. 41, No. 2).

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Dissertation project

I defended my dissertation "Do Your Bit, Claim Your Share: Justice, Ethos, and the Individual Duty to Contribute", at Stockholm University in November of 2020. It develops and defends an account of contributive justice, specifying who should contribute to justice and why, as well as what a contribution is and how an individual duty to contribute should be enforced.

Parts of the project were conducted as a visiting Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Harvard University and as a Visiting Doctoral Student at the Department of Politics and International Relations and The Centre for the Study of Social Justice, Oxford University. I also had the chance to be on two periods of parental leave during the project

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Other research interests

I am also interested the legitimacy of systems of norms and sanctions, the moral aspect of markets, and I am working on a paper about the the political relevance of hypocrisy.

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