The Bot Imperative
The current debate over the ethics of automation misses a key question that both the public and companies need to consider: When is it unethical to not replace—or augment—humans with AI? @ Information Week
Happy Stoic New Year!
How to rethink your idea of success in the new year – according to ancient Stoic philosophers. @ The Conversation
Comedy and Culture
Comedy can often give offense, especially when it concerns such sensitive topics as race, gender, and sexuality. Should comedy like that be shunned, boycotted, even banned? Can it be enjoyed without danger? Or could it even, at its best, be the road to a better society? Could it somehow help us all to live together, and to come to terms with intractable social issues we’ll never fully put behind us? [audio] @ Philosophy Talk
Wither Consciousness?
What kind of conscious inner dialogue do people engage in so as to convince themselves that they have no conscious inner dialogue? @ Institute for Art and Ideas
Do Philosophers Dream of Akratic Sheep?
Profile piece on philosopher and sci-fi junkie Peter Boghossian. @ Wired
On Not Knowing Your Own Mind
“Whatever consciousness you actually have, it is different from the consciousness that you think you have.” @ Institute for Art and Ideas
Philosophy on Hampstead Heath
“We are all living this puzzle daily and people are talking about philosophy again.” @ Flux Magazine
Inexplicable Technology
People distrust artificial intelligence. Many organizations have prioritized AI complexity over explainability. Complex AI algorithms allow us to get results that were previously unattainable. However, the blackbox nature of these systems means it isn’t straightforward to understand the logic behind how the systems are doing what they are doing. @ Forbes
Privacy and the Gender Binary
In some cases resisting the gender binary can be a push for privacy, a challenge to our social practice of figuring out what gender a person is immediately, pretty much before we figure out anything else about them. This immediately gives rise to come pretty interesting ethical questions. [audio] — Univ of Chicago
Ethical-tech Vs Hackathon
Ethical Tech, an undergraduate student group, staged an educational intervention at the HackDuke hackathon. — Duke Chronicle
In the Cultures of the Matriarch
An interview with philosopher Heide Goettner-Abendroth who has done extensive research on matriarchy in indigenous cultures. @ Huffington Post
Churchland and Theory of Mind
A philosophical profile piece on philosopher Patricia Churchland whose work tries to take the philosophical implications of new brain research seriously without falling into the scientistic traps. — Prospect Magazine (UK)
AI Goes to War
The Pentagon takes the next big step of deploying artificial intelligence to aid troops and help select battlefield targets, amid lingering ethical concerns about using the technology for waging war. — Bloomberg Govt
Digital Bias and Facial-Recognition Technology
Amid growing ethical concerns over the threat of AI-enabled systems to perpetuate discrimination and bias and infringe upon privacy, California has introduced several bills intended to curb negative impacts. — World Economic Forum
Real World Ethics: Getting Off the Trolley
How should we go about deciding what to do? Philosophers often discuss abstract simplified thought experiments. But is the best way to go about things? Philosopher James Wilson thinks not. [audio] — Philosophy Bites
Weighing Reasons, Weighing Disagreement
Profile piece on a philosopher and a visiting doctoral student who are doing research on weighing reasons and making sense of disagreement. — William & Mary College
Philosophy in the Wake of Empire
Like everything else, philosophy is shaped by its cultural context. For the Western tradition, that cultural context has included centuries of colonization and empire-building. How has this shaped the discipline? [audio] — Philosopher’s Zone
Conscious Machines
Computers have already surpassed us in their ability to perform certain cognitive tasks. Perhaps it won’t be long till every household has a super intelligent robot who can outperform us in almost every domain. While future AI might be excellent at appearing conscious, could AI ever actually become conscious? Would forcing conscious robots to work for us be akin to slavery? And could we design AI that specifically lacks consciousness, or is consciousness an emergent property of intelligence? [audio] — Philosophy Talk
Ethics of the 4-Day Work Week
The idea of a shorter-work week can’t just be about the hours, if the aim is to increase the amount of time available for doing what you want.
The Paradox of Dogmatism
Is refusing to consider evidence against one’s views always wrong? Saul Kripke – widely regarded as the most influential analytic philosopher alive today – explores what we should do when faced with things that don’t quite add up. [video] — Institute of Art and Ideas
AI, Ethics and Education
AI holds enormous potential for transforming the way we teach. At a certain point it may be unethical for us not to use AI. But whenever we talk about transforming something—like educational institutions, we should ask what we will be transforming it into. [audio] — Future Tense
The Trouble with Humanism
If you believe that as a human being, your rights and interests carry more moral weight than the rights and interests of a cat or a chicken, then you’re most likely a humanist. But should you be? How well does humanism’s account of itself hold up in philosophical terms? —Philosopher’s Zone
Ethics of Synthetic Media
Media featuring digital “people” has already arrived and ethical and social issues abound.
Earth, Air, Fire and Water
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry on the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles. In the middle of the fifth century BCE, Empedocles of Acragas pioneered the influential four-part theory of roots (air, water, earth, and fire) along with two active principles of Love and Strife, which influenced later philosophy, medicine, mysticism, cosmology, and religion. The philosophical system responded to Parmenides’ rejection of change while embracing religious injunctions and magical practices. As a result, Empedocles has occupied a significant position in the history of Presocratic philosophy as a figure moving between mythos and logos, religion and science.
What Is It Like to Be a Cat?
Isn’t this what we really wanted to know all along? A review of Lars Svendsen’s recent book Understanding Animals: Philosophy for Dog and Cat Lovers.
Pythagoras’ Dribble Cup
Besides proving the Pythagorean Theorem, ancient philosopher Pythagoras also invented the dribble cup. It’s like we owe everything to philosophers!
Have We Reached the Limit?
Since human brains were evolutionarily adapted to solve practical problems impinging on our survival and reproduction, not to unravel the theoretical fabric of the universe, some philosophers argue there are bound to be things we will never understand. Human science will therefore one day hit a hard limit – and may already have done so. But does this argument hold up? Philosopher Maarten Boudry discusses.
On Misgendering
Misgendering is when someone addresses someone else in a way that corresponds to the wrong gender. There are some people who don’t care at all, and they constitute interesting edge cases that we should take seriously. But a lot of people do care, and there’s some work to be done explaining why. Philosopher Stephanie Kapusta lays out some of the basic reasons why misgendering someone is a kind of moral harm. (audio)
A Good Place for Moral Philosophy
Philosopher Lydia Morland interivews the producer of The Good Place and its co-star William Jackson Harper who plays ethics professor Chidi Anagonye. (video)
On Wildly Implausible Ideas
Some philosophers have drawn very strange conclusions about the nature of reality. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t study their work. Historian of philosophy Emily Thomas discusses how wildly implausible metaphysics can be enlightening when we learn the reasons why these philosophers adopted these positions. (audio)
Philosophy Booth at the Farmers Market
Profile piece on philosophy doctoral student Rena Beatrice Goldstein who recently opened her own “Ask a Philosopher Booth”. They caught up with her at a local farmers market.
Does That AI Have Your Best Interest at Heart (or Someone Else’s)?
“Don’t be evil,” now seems both prescient and naive. As we create systems that are more capable of understanding and targeting services at individual users, our capacity to do evil by automating bias and weaponizing algorithms will grow exponentially. [For companies that use such technology,] merely complying with the law has never been more perilous, nor more morally insufficient.
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What Makes Science Trustworthy
Philosopher Philip Kitcher discusses Naomi Oreskes’ recent book Why Trust Science? The book is based on Oreskes’ Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Princeton in 2016, and includes commentaries by a historian, a philosopher, and three social scientists.
The Ethics of Predictive Policing
Prof. Duncan Purves has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study the ethics of using artificial intelligence for predictive policing.
The Dogged Philosopher
Dogs are a bridge between nature and culture, between the world of the animal kingdom, and the human kingdom and civilization. An interview with philosopher Mark Alizart on the subject of his recent book Dogs: A Philosophical Guide to Our Best Friends.
AI Ethics and Power
AI has been called one of the great human rights challenges of the 21st century. And it’s not just about doing the right thing or making the best AI systems possible, it’s about who wields power and how AI affects the balance of power in everything it touches.