This talk is part of the Advanced Seminar on Law and Technology series.
Date: March 24, 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 6pm – 7pm
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Bertram F. Malle (Professor, Cognitive and Psychological Sciences (CoPsy) Department, Brown University)
There is much talk about the need to have “value alignment” between artificial agents (AI, robots) and humans.But such alignment is neither possible nor meaningful unless we change our focus from values to norms and from alignment to compatibility. As artificial agents are spreading rapidly in human society, there is no doubt that they should follow social and moral norms—many of the same norms that humans are expected to follow but also some machine-specific ones. I will present conceptual and empirical work that clarifies what norms are and how they function in human communities; then I outline technical paths to build relevant norms into machines; and finally I explore how the legal system can contribute to codifying and enforcing those norms.
Bertram F. Malle earned his Master’s degrees in philosophy, linguistics and psychology at the University of Graz, Austria and his Ph.D. at Stanford University. Since 2008 he is Professor at the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. He received the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Outstanding Dissertation award, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and he is past president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology. Malle’s research has been funded by the NSF, Army, Templeton Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and DARPA. He has distributed his work in 130 articles and several books, on the topics of social cognition (intentionality, mental state inferences, behavior explanations), moral psychology (cognitive and social blame, guilt, norms), and human-robot interaction (moral competence in robots, socially assistive robotics).
Moderator: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of the Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=105317. A paper will be circulated in advance and attendees will be expected to have read the paper before the seminar.
We are applying for a CPD point with the Law Society of Hong Kong.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.