On the border between humans and machines – Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and New Regulatory Norms
International, Multidisciplinary Research Project and Project Launch Conference at PPKE
On 18 March 2026, Pázmány Péter Catholic University will host the opening conference of the research project entitled “On the border between humans and machines: Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and New Regulatory Norms”. The event focuses on the ethical, legal, and regulatory questions raised by the rapid social expansion of artificial intelligence (AI), and explores how a practical, yet theoretically grounded framework can be developed to support the safe, transparent, responsible, and human-centred use of AI.
The project is being implemented through international cooperation, with our key transatlantic partner, The Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.). The aim goes beyond the research programme of a single institution: we are building a professional and institutional network in which theological–philosophical anthropology, ethics, law, and cutting-edge research on AI safety and interpretability mutually reinforce one another, contributing to the responsible integration of new technologies into society.
One of the project’s central pillars is the development of an anthropological and general AI-ethical framework. The stakes are nothing less than a rearticulation of the “image of the human person” in the age of AI: what do human freedom, responsibility, and dignity mean when algorithmic systems take part in decision preparation, content generation, and even interpretation? The research places special emphasis on the ontological dimension of truth: how truth can be understood in the case of AI-driven decisions and AI-generated content, how authentic and false content can be distinguished, and how phenomena such as AI hallucination or distorted inference can be addressed.
The project conducts targeted research in five key areas. These are the social arenas that are particularly sensitive to the impacts of AI.
- Care and healthcare: The research focuses on protecting vulnerable groups and providing an ethical foundation for healthcare and care-related decisions. We will examine in particular how human responsibility and oversight can be maintained alongside algorithmic support, and what role ethical audits can play in practice. Our aim is to articulate principles and control criteria that can also be applied in everyday care settings.
- Economy: We analyse questions of responsibility and accountability in algorithmic decision-making, especially where automated systems influence resource allocation, access, or evaluation. We examine the impact of incentive structures as well as the mechanisms through which structural biases arise and persist. The goal is to develop responsible application frameworks that are not only technically viable, but can also be defended in normative terms.
- Peace and security: We explore the ethical and regulatory challenges of AI applications in security policy, with particular attention to crisis situations. We examine norms and risk-mitigation strategies that can be interpreted both in peacetime and in crisis. The aim is to define the minimum conditions for responsible use in contexts where the cost of error is exceptionally high.
- Education: In the field of education, epistemological questions, critical thinking, and the development of the interpretation of AI-generated content come to the fore. Our special focus is higher education and the training of psychologists, where questions of knowledge, source criticism, and responsibility have direct professional consequences. Our aim is for anthropological and ethical insights to appear as pedagogical practice as well.
- Governance and control: The regulatory dimension of the project aims to create a coherent, usable regulatory ecosystem. We compare national AI strategies and European Union standards, with particular attention to data protection, transparency, auditability, and redress mechanisms. We develop proposals for independent control and ethical audit models, as well as recommendations that can be used in different operating environments. The work is also supported by an international regulatory network to be established, which is capable of developing shared policy recommendations.
The research programme’s solid institutional and professional foundation is provided by PPKE’s interdisciplinary structure; at the same time, the implementation of the project relies on the close cooperation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (BTK) and the Faculty of Information Technology and Bionics (ITK). BTK provides the philosophical–theological–anthropological and ethical knowledge base without which the social consequences of AI cannot be understood in depth; ITK contributes from the technological side to ensuring responsibility by examining the interpretability and safety of AI systems. In the project, mechanistic interpretability methods support the causal exploration of the internal workings of AI systems, and the “psychological testing” of large language models is also under way to identify biases, instabilities, and risky behavioural patterns.
The international dimension is not merely “background”, but one of the project’s main driving forces. The aim of the joint workshops and publications emerging within the international network is to ensure that our responses to ethical and regulatory questions related to AI are interpretable and applicable across multiple cultural and institutional contexts.
The project kickoff conference is the first major milestone of this shared thinking. Our invited speakers are leading experts in artificial intelligence and ethics, as well as in the field of religious studies; their talks focus on the social acceptability of machine decisions, ways to ensure transparency, and the manageability of AI’s “black box” character.
We believe that technological innovation and the protection of human dignity are not mutually exclusive goals, but mutually presupposing requirements – and that PPKE, building on cooperation between the humanities and the technical sciences, is able to offer truly, internationally relevant models for this.
The conference starts at 9:30 in Hungarian with in-person attendance, and continues from 15:00 online, in English.
