Jason Millar

B.Sc.E. (Engineering Physics), M.A. (Philosophy), Ph.D. (Philosophy)

Twitter: @jasonmillar

Personal Website: jasonmillar.ca

Postdoctoral Research Fellow – Stanford University

Jason is an ethicist and engineer with over twenty years of experience working in industry, public sector, policy, and academic settings. He is an internationally recognized expert in his field having advised on topics surrounding the ethics and governance of robotics and AI for more than a decade, with a recent focus on autonomous and connected vehicles, predictive machine learning algorithms and military robotics.

Jason worked for several years as an engineer in the aerospace and telecommunications industries before returning to pursue academic studies in philosophy full time. He is currently researching and developing frameworks to help designers, engineers and policymakers identify and address ethical issues related to automation technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, machine learning systems and military robotics.

Jason is the author of several book chapters, peer-reviewed academic articles, policy reports and articles in the popular media addressing the ethics of autonomous vehicles, and the ethics and governance of robotics and AI generally. His involvement with the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) played a role in influencing the development of the US Department of Transportation (DOT) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) recently released Federal Automated Vehicles Policy. He is also currently working with the Canadian Government on the development of their autonomous and connected vehicles policies. Jason’s work has been widely featured in the international media, including outlets such as WIRED, the Guardian, CBC, BBC and NPR. He is regularly invited to speak at academic, public sector, and industry events on various topics surrounding the ethics and governance of robotics and AI. In 2015 Jason presented expert testimony concerning military robotics at the UN Informal Meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons, convened under the auspices of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). He recently provided testimony at the Canadian Senate Open Caucus on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Military Applications.

Jason is the Chief Ethics Analyst at the Open Roboethics Institute (ORi). ORi is a think tank that aims to foster active discussions around emerging ethical, legal, and social issues raised by robotics, automation and AI technologies. They have conducted public engagement on various ethical topics surrounding autonomous vehicles, military robotics and social robotics. ORi’s work has been featured widely in the popular media. Their most recent policy report, The Ethics and Governance of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems – An International Public Opinion Poll, was presented to the UN in 2016, which helped elevate the issue at the UN and internationally. Currently, ORi is collaborating on an international project headed by the Korean Transport Institute (KOTI), aimed at supporting the development of Korea’s emerging autonomous vehicle policies.