James Martineau Lecture 2026 - Hobart

Trust Me, I'm an Algorithm 

Ask ten people whether they trust AI and you'll get ten answers — partly because they're not all talking about the same thing. Trusting your car to start is not the same as trusting a friend to keep a secret, yet we reach for the same word for both. So, when people say AI needs to earn our trust, which kind do they have in mind?

This talk untangles the surprising number of things we mean by trust and asks which of them we owe to AI — and which AI could ever really earn. The distinction carries a moral weight: some of what we call trust asks for goodwill and genuine care, things a machine simply cannot offer, and pretending otherwise means resting real moral decisions on a comforting fiction. To ground all this, I'll share new data on how people actually think about trusting AI.

Sam Baron is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne and convenor for AI research. His research lies within metaphysics and philosophy of science. He has particular interests in the metaphysics of quantum gravity, in explanation within mathematics and in explanainability in artificial intelligence. He has held positions at the University of Sydney (2013-2014), the University of Western Australia (2014-2019) and the Australian Catholic University (2020-2023). He is the recipient of two large grants from the Australian Research Council to study the nature of time in philosophy and physics and currently holds a grant with the Icelandic Research Fund to study the nature of philosophical progress. He is an executive member of the Australasian Association of Philosophy and a member of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney. 

Please join us for refreshments from 5.30pm, prior to the lecture commencing at 6.00pm.