Hello!

I'm Josh, a bioethicist and philosopher of technology specialising in medical AI ethics at the University of Copenhagen's Center for the Philosophy of AI. I received my PhD from Monash University in 2024, where my dissertation — “Data over dialogue: Why artificial intelligence is unlikely to humanise medicine” — won the annual departmental award for Best PhD Thesis in Philosophy and Bioethics.

My research aims to connect big picture philosophical questions with real world ethical problems that arise with new (medical) technologies. I work at the intersection of philosophy, medicine, and computer science, and frequently contribute to interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers from these (and other) specialisations. I’m often interested in collaborating on new projects, so please feel free to reach out if you wish to discuss any ideas or proposals.

My current projects focus on ethical and epistemological challenges arising from federated learning in healthcare, AI-driven aesthetic judgments in cosmetic surgery, large language models in healthcare administration, chatbots and postmortem avators (“griefbots”), and mechanistic interpretability.

News

  • 7/9/2025: New podcast appearance on AITEC (AI and Technology Ethics Circle) discussing my recent article, “Are clinicians ethically obligation to disclose their use of medical machine learning systems to patients?” [listen] / [read]

  • 17/7/2025: Awarded 2026 Visiting Fellowship with FAU Erlangen’s Centre for Philosophy and AI Research.

  • 24/6/2025: New pre-print, Mechanistic interpretability needs philosophy (with Iwan Williams, Ninell Oldenburg, Ruchira Dhar, Constanza Fierro, Nina Rajcic, Sandrine R. Schiller, Filippos Stamatiou, and Anders Søgaard). [read]

  • 15/5/2025: New podcast appearance on Death by Algorithm discussing the impact of model updating on AI-assisted decision-making in warfare. [listen]

  • 29/4/2025: New pre-print, “Federated learning, ethics, and the double black box problem in medical AI.” Co-authored with Anders Søgaard, Angela Ballantyne, and Ruben Pauwels. [read]

  • 4/4/2025: New article, “A moving target in AI-assisted decision-making: Dataset shift, model updating, and the problem of update opacity,” published in Ethics and Information Technology. [read]

* these are some gentle, friendly danish holstein cows i enjoyed visiting when i lived in århus, denmark