This is Philosophy Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy Bites is available at www. www.com.

In the brave new world of AI, predictions are increasingly shaping our lives.

The Oxford philosopher Carissa Bélez, whose book Prophecy has just been published,

argues that we should reflect on how

these predictions work and how they affect us.

Grysavelis, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you for having me, Nigel.

The topic we're going to focus on today is prophecy.

I'm not quite sure what that's got to do with philosophy.

Could you say what the link is?

There are many links. One, to philosophy of language, what is it that we do when we make a prediction?

And two, what's the ethics of prediction? How should we use them? When is it okay to use them?

And when is it not? So let's start with the first one. When somebody makes a prediction about the future, they prophesy what's going to happen. What's going on philosophically there?

I think predictions as sentences are very misleading because they sound like descriptions about the

world. I think it's intuitive to think that when somebody makes a prediction, they are describing

the way the world will look in the future.

But actually, when you assess how predictions are used in the public sphere,

you realize that very often, and in particular when it comes to social predictions.

Predictions are closer to verdicts or commands.

So, for example, when a tech executive says, tomorrow we will

be using AI for everything and everywhere, he's not trying to figure out how the world is going

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