Juan Pablo Bermúdez

I am a philosopher and cognitive scientist working on the issue of control: How do we exert control over our actions? What are the limits of that control? And what are the ethical and political implications of our limitations, as they intersect with social contexts and new technologies?

Currently I am assistant professor at Externado de Colombia University, Postdoctoral Researcher at TU Delft, and Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in Technology, TU Hamburg.

My work currently focuses on two areas:

• Creating tools to design autonomy-supportive artificial intelligence. This involves identifying the ethical boundaries of AI-based influence, building a classification of mental harms, and building tools that developers and designers can use to check whether their AI systems support or hinder human autonomy. I develop this work as postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft’s Digital Ethics Centre.

• Understanding the link between self-control and poverty in the Global South. Most work on self-control has studied populations in the Global North. What can we learn from the nature of human agency and rationality by studying the skills and strategies people develop in a broader set of contexts? I develop this work as professor of philosophy and leader of the Templeton-funded project Self-Control in Context at Universidad Externado de Colombia.

I have been visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science, and Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).

I have recently become editor of the wonderful Diversity Reading List for the ‘philosophy of action’ and ‘ethics of technology’ categories. I am also Philpapers editor of the ‘trying’ and ‘habit’ categories.