Martin Bekker
Speaker at AMLD Africa 2026
Dr. Martin Bekker is an AI ethics researcher and computational social scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand. He holds a PhD and degrees in Philosophy, Peace Studies, and Development from the LSE, Bradford, The univeristy of Johannesburg and Stellenbosch. Currently a fellow at the MIND Institute, he previously led research for the Royal Bafokeng Administration and served on a World Economic Forum advisory panel.
At AMLD Africa
WITS University, Johannesburg, South Africa
Too many twos: The value alignment problem visited twice
The alignment problem has become a pervasive industry mantra, yet it frequently rests on shaky foundations of undefined values and presumed consensus. This talk interrogates the very nature of values (and value studies) itself, challenging how we define, measure, and encode ethical frameworks into probabilistic models. I will then examine/report the emerging “value profiles” of contemporary LLMs. By reframing the conversation from abstract philosophy to concrete metrics, we can develop a more robust approach to the interface between human ethics and machine outputs.
AI Panel with Samuel Segun, Edmund Ugar, Paige Benton an Martin Bekker
AI Ethics Beyond the Global North: African Priorities and Perspectives
