John Tasioulas is Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and Director of the Institute for Ethics in AI.

He was born in Australia, his parents having emigrated from Greece in the early 1960s. He received degrees in philosophy and law from the University of Melbourne and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford where he completed a D.Phil on moral relativism under the supervision of Joseph Raz.

He was a Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1998-2010), Quain Professor of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Laws, University College London (2011-14), and Yeoh Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Law and Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy, and Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London (2014-2020). He has held visiting positions at the Australian National University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the University of Melbourne.

His recent writings focus on philosophical issues regarding punishment, human rights and international law. He is the co-editor of The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

AI2050 Project

Our existing human rights frameworks were created before AI. In a world in which AI is rapidly being integrated into human life, we need a different set of augmented human rights. In John’s project, he will develop a new ethical framework for this new world and put it in practice in three ways. First, he will suggest new human rights that society should adopt in anticipation of the age of AI. Second, he will create guidelines for AI developers on how to integrate this framework into AI systems they are building. Third, he will explore how these new human rights can be supported and defended by advances in deliberative democracy that use AI to overcome current limitations.

Project Artifacts

J. Tasioulas and N. Shadbolt. Time is running out: six ways to contain AI. The Sunday Times. 2023.

AI2050 Community Perspective — John Tasioulas (2023)