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Interview conducted by Wanda Teays, Acting Director of the Bioethics Certificate Program

Thank you, Dr. Spence, for agreeing to be in the Spotlight for the Bioethics Certificate Program here at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles! We would appreciate your sharing with us a bit about you and your work as a Bioethicist.

What is your current position?
Honorary Research Associate, University of Sydney, Humanities, Philosophy, and Senior Research Fellow, 4TU Centre for Ethics and Technology, The Netherlands. I have been there for 18 years.

How long have you been working in Bioethics and Medical Ethics?
Not my main area of Research but I did some work on the Ethics of Clinical Trials and was on the NSW Medical Ethics Committee (Sydney, Australia). Currently I am doing research on the Ethics of Technology and specifically on the area where Bioethics meets the Digital Ethics of AI Intelligent Agents. My forthcoming book is Wisdom in the Age of Intelligent Machines (Palgrave McMillan, 2025), that looks at the crossroads between Bioethics and Digital Ethics with regard to the notion of Wisdom.

What are your job duties?
Mainly I work in Research with public lectures on the topic of AI Intelligence.

What drew you to working in this field? What got you involved in Philosophy plays?
I have been doing Philosophy Plays that combine original philosophy with dramatic performances including audience participation through discussion at various theatre venues in Australia and the US.

Do hospitals in Australia have Bioethicists like in the US?
They certainly do, and there’s a lot of interaction between the two.

What advice would you give to students interested in going into the field of Bioethics?
My only advice is to examine critically how Bioethics crosses over and combines with digital ethics, especially the ethics of AI intelligence agents, such as ChatGPT, and the idea of Singularity where the two meet.

What do you see are the key issues we need to address?
One key issue is how Bioethics meets and interacts with Digital Ethics.

What are the greatest satisfactions from working in Bioethics?
In examining how Bioethics interacts with Digital Ethics.

What do you think are some challenges we face?
One of the main challenges is the Control Problem AI Intelligence: Who controls AI Intelligence? Us or the Big Tech Companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google, as well as the Alignment Problem of AI, namely, can the goals of AI Intelligence align with ours?

Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us—and for your contribution to the field of Bioethics.