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Crossposted on X here: https://x.com/kevin__dong__/status/2115079682412728352
On October 20, 2026, Kevin Dong conducted an interview with James Mattingly, Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and coauthor of Machine Agency (2025) with Beba Cibralic. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549981/machine-agency/
James Mattingly: Neither Beba Cibralic nor I are particularly experts in AI. We come at it from very different directions, both from each other and from perspectives that aren’t primarily about artificial intelligence. She comes at it more or less from just war theory. She was a graduate student at Georgetown whom I recruited around 2016 or 2017, and she was doing a PhD in political philosophy.
One of the things we do at Georgetown, like every graduate program, is have these gatekeeping courses. One of them is in logic, which I frequently teach to graduate students. I teach the course from the perspective of computability, using Boolos, Burgess, and Jeffrey’s Computability and Logic. So a lot of the fundamental results concerning incompleteness, representability, and so forth are presented from the perspective of Turing-machine implementation and the equivalence between Turing machines and other kinds of machines.
In the spring of 2020, Beba and another graduate student asked me to teach a graduate seminar on the philosophy of technology, which I knew a little about, but not much. So we had to start from scratch, and we worked it up together. A lot of different things came up, but one recurring question was who was responsible for decisions made by the AI systems being used at the time for loan approvals, various background checks, and so forth. Banks were rolling these systems out, and they were completely inscrutable. Nobody knew exactly what was going on inside them.
At the end of the seminar, Beba told me I should write a book about this. I had no real capacity to do that on my own, so