Max Darby awarded CACSSS scholarship

Max Darby, a graduate of UCC's BA in Digital Humanities & Information Technology (CK118), has been awarded a PhD scholarship as part of the Employment-Based PhD Programme in the College of Arts, Celtic Studies & Social Sciences (CACSSS) at UCC. The programme allows students to conduct research at UCC with support from a partner organisation in the private sector. Max will be working at the Musgrave Group for the duration of his research.

Max intends to research the extent to which the output of artificially intelligent systems should be challenged or trusted in areas that require significant moral considerations. In order to achieve this, he will address epistemic and ethical questions regarding value-systems and outsourcing decision-making by comparing them to similar mechanisms found in religion(s). His project aims to understand if and how artificially intelligent (AI) systems will reflect the value-systems of the owners, creators, and users of the system. Ultimately the thesis is an attempt to understand how AI systems shape culture.

"Musgrave is a business that adheres to long standing corporate values and maintains a strong sense of social responsibility to the local communities they serve. This research will align with their policy of growing good business, which takes a long-term, sustainable, ethical approach to doing business across all functions of the company," said Max.

Max will be co-supervised by Dr Órla Murphy, Department of Digital Humanities, and Dr Joel Walmsley, Department of Philosophy.