About

Hi, I am Filippo (Italian, yes). I am a professor of ethics of technology at Eindhoven University of Technology (the Netherlands). I did my studies in philosophy and I obtained my PhD on the philosophical foundations of moral and legal responsibility at the University of Torino, Italy, my hometown. Since I moved to the Netherlands in 2012, I have specialized in ethics of technology, and in particular in the ethics of AI. I have worked over twelve years as a researcher and lecturer at the section Ethics and Philosophy of Technology of TU Delft (2012-2024), and since September 2024 I have been appointed full professor in the Philosophy and Ethics group at TU Eindhoven. Yay.

Among the many things I have written (see full list here), I am particularly proud of my recent monograph Human Freedom in the Age of AI (Routledge, 2024) which synthesizes and presents some key topics of my past and present work in AI Ethics: ethics of AI in the workplace, meaningful human control, responsibility gaps, and design for democracy.

I am also very excited about the recent publication of the Research Handbook of Meaningful Human Control over AI Systems (Elgar, 2024), a multidisciplinary book in philosophy, law and engineering, which I have co-edited with five fantastic colleagues and friends, with the ambition to create a solid starting point of reference for future research on a topic about which we are all very excited – and quite competent :). We have also recently launched a research Centre for Meaningful Human Control.

To make philosophy matter and my life less boring, I often go beyond academic philosophy writing:

I am strongly committed to teaching and education. I have over twelve years of experience in teaching ethics and philosophy to engineering students in Dutch technical universities (Delft and Eindhoven). I also taught philosophy and history in a high school in Torino for two and a half years. Here is a Ted-talk-style public lecture, which I enjoyed very much recording, and which can give you the sense of my lecturing style. However, my university courses are usually more interactive than that.  

I have been involved in some important policy initiatives. I contributed to organise the “academic forum” within the first summit on Responsible AI in the Military (REAIM) (The Hague, 2023), I was the Rapporteur of the report of the EU Commission Expert Group on the ethics of self-driving cars; I wrote a White Paper on the ethics of self-driving cars for the Dutch Ministry of Transportation; and I co-authored a 90-page ‘evaluation schema’ for the ethical use of robots in security for the Swiss Ministry of Defence.

I connect as much as I can with engineers and scholars in other disciplines, and some of these collaborations have translated into concrete multidisciplinary research projects, such as Meaningful Human Control over Automated Driving Systems, ELSA Lab Defence, and the ongoing initiative on Worker-Robot Relations (lead by the recent Stevin prize recipient David Abbink).

I love music and stage performances. I am a self-learned guitarist and singer-songwriter. You can – but do not have to – listen to some of my songs, instrumented and performed with the Picccola Orchestra Altrimaestri around 2010-2011. I have also collaborated with the Italian musician Simone Zoja in the writing and realization of multimedia stage performances on political themes such as the Shoah (“Primo e il pozzo”), the Balkan wars of the 90s (“Due sponde”), and the desaparecidos in Argentina (“Dal buio”).

I have come to believe that (performing) arts are a powerful way to make ethical and political issues more visible and to motivate people not only to reflect but also to take action. I am currently studying and experimenting about the use of (performative) arts like theater and story-telling in teaching (engineering) ethics.

In 2018, I have co-authored with Corrado del Bo a book on the philosophy of football (La Partita perfetta: Filosofia del calcio, in Italian).

Yes, I love sport. I had a very promising career as futsal player which culminated in the winning of the Italian Under 21 national title as a captain of the Torino Calcetto team in 2000. That promising career has remained as such, but it was great fun playing and coaching glorious teams of friends. In 2008 I completed the Paris marathon with a – very decent, I would say – time of 4 hours and 10 minutes and I still enjoy running (shorter distances). I practiced Capoeira for some years under a nickname that thankfully only very close friends will remember. I still play tennis at a competitive level, with great passion and mixed results. My trainer recently told me at the end of one training session: ‘you are playing very well, Filippo; you just need to stop trying playing like Sinner’. Fair enough.