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  1. Kantian Ethics and the Attention Economy.Timothy Aylsworth & Clinton Castro - 2024 - Palgrave Macmillan.
    In this open access book, Timothy Aylsworth and Clinton Castro draw on the deep well of Kantian ethics to argue that we have moral duties, both to ourselves and to others, to protect our autonomy from the threat posed by the problematic use of technology. The problematic use of technologies like smartphones threatens our autonomy in a variety of ways, and critics have only begun to appreciate the vast scope of this problem. In the last decade, we have seen a (...)
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  • Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy: On the Ethical Dimension of Recommender Systems.Sofia Bonicalzi, Mario De Caro & Benedetta Giovanola - 2023 - Topoi 42 (3):819-832.
    Feasting on a plethora of social media platforms, news aggregators, and online marketplaces, recommender systems (RSs) are spreading pervasively throughout our daily online activities. Over the years, a host of ethical issues have been associated with the diffusion of RSs and the tracking and monitoring of users’ data. Here, we focus on the impact RSs may have on personal autonomy as the most elusive among the often-cited sources of grievance and public outcry. On the grounds of a philosophically nuanced notion (...)
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  • Manipulation, injustice, and technology.Michael Klenk - 2022 - In Michael Klenk & Fleur Jongepier (eds.), The Philosophy of Online Manipulation. Routledge. pp. 108-131.
    This chapter defends the view that manipulated behaviour is explained by an injustice. Injustices that explain manipulated behaviour need not involve agential features such as intentionality. Therefore, technology can manipulate us, even if technological artefacts like robots, intelligent software agents, or other ‘mere tools’ lack agential features such as intentionality. The chapter thus sketches a comprehensive account of manipulated behaviour related to but distinct from existing accounts of manipulative behaviour. It then builds on that account to defend the possibility that (...)
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  • The Philosophy of Online Manipulation.Michael Klenk & Fleur Jongepier (eds.) - 2022 - Routledge.
    Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online? This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user-friendly design, micro-targeting, default-settings, gamification, and real-time profiling. The authors in this (...)
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  • Through the Newsfeed Glass: Rethinking Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers.Giacomo Figà Talamanca & Selene Arfini - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (1):1-34.
    In this paper, we will re-elaborate the notions of filter bubble and of echo chamber by considering human cognitive systems’ limitations in everyday interactions and how they experience digital technologies. Researchers who applied the concept of filter bubble and echo chambers in empirical investigations see them as forms of algorithmically-caused systems that seclude the users of digital technologies from viewpoints and opinions that oppose theirs. However, a significant majority of empirical research has shown that users do find and interact with (...)
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  • Trust Me on This One: Conforming to Conversational Assistants.Donna Schreuter, Peter van der Putten & Maarten H. Lamers - 2021 - Minds and Machines 31 (4):535-562.
    Conversational artificial agents and artificially intelligent voice assistants are becoming increasingly popular. Digital virtual assistants such as Siri, or conversational devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Home are permeating everyday life, and are designed to be more and more humanlike in their speech. This study investigates the effect this can have on one’s conformity with an AI assistant. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch’s already demonstrated the power and danger of conformity amongst people. In these classical experiments test persons were (...)
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  • The social turn of artificial intelligence.Nello Cristianini, Teresa Scantamburlo & James Ladyman - 2021 - AI and Society (online).
    Social machines are systems formed by material and human elements interacting in a structured way. The use of digital platforms as mediators allows large numbers of humans to participate in such machines, which have interconnected AI and human components operating as a single system capable of highly sophisticated behavior. Under certain conditions, such systems can be understood as autonomous goal-driven agents. Many popular online platforms can be regarded as instances of this class of agent. We argue that autonomous social machines (...)
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  • Responsible nudging for social good: new healthcare skills for AI-driven digital personal assistants.Marianna Capasso & Steven Umbrello - 2022 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 25 (1):11-22.
    Traditional medical practices and relationships are changing given the widespread adoption of AI-driven technologies across the various domains of health and healthcare. In many cases, these new technologies are not specific to the field of healthcare. Still, they are existent, ubiquitous, and commercially available systems upskilled to integrate these novel care practices. Given the widespread adoption, coupled with the dramatic changes in practices, new ethical and social issues emerge due to how these systems nudge users into making decisions and changing (...)
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  • Varieties of artifacts: Embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective.Richard Heersmink - 2021 - Topics in Cognitive Science (4):1-24.
    The primary goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the various relations between material artifacts and the embodied mind. A secondary goal of this essay is to identify some of the trends in the design and use of artifacts. First, based on their functional properties, I identify four categories of artifacts co-opted by the embodied mind, namely (1) embodied artifacts, (2) perceptual artifacts, (3) cognitive artifacts, and (4) affective artifacts. These categories can overlap and (...)
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  • Measuring Automated Influence: Between Empirical Evidence and Ethical Values.Daniel Susser & Vincent Grimaldi - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
    Automated influence, delivered by digital targeting technologies such as targeted advertising, digital nudges, and recommender systems, has attracted significant interest from both empirical researchers, on one hand, and critical scholars and policymakers on the other. In this paper, we argue for closer integration of these efforts. Critical scholars and policymakers, who focus primarily on the social, ethical, and political effects of these technologies, need empirical evidence to substantiate and motivate their concerns. However, existing empirical research investigating the effectiveness of these (...)
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  • (1 other version)Artifacts and affordances: from designed properties to possibilities for action.Fabio Tollon - 2021 - AI and Society 2:1-10.
    In this paper I critically evaluate the value neutrality thesis regarding technology, and find it wanting. I then introduce the various ways in which artifacts can come to influence moral value, and our evaluation of moral situations and actions. Here, following van de Poel and Kroes, I introduce the idea of value sensitive design. Specifically, I show how by virtue of their designed properties, artifacts may come to embody values. Such accounts, however, have several shortcomings. In agreement with Michael Klenk, (...)
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  • Fake News and Epistemic Vice: Combating a Uniquely Noxious Market.Megan Fritts & Frank Cabrera - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association (3):1-22.
    The topic of fake news has received increased attention from philosophers since the term became a favorite of politicians (Habgood-Coote 2016; Dentith 2016). Notably missing from the conversation, however, is a discussion of fake news and conspiracy theory media as a market. This paper will take as its starting point the account of noxious markets put forward by Debra Satz (2010), and will argue that there is a pro tanto moral reason to restrict the market for fake news. Specifically, we (...)
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  • (Online) Manipulation: Sometimes Hidden, Always Careless.Michael Klenk - forthcoming - Review of Social Economy.
    Ever-increasing numbers of human interactions with intelligent software agents, online and offline, and their increasing ability to influence humans have prompted a surge in attention toward the concept of (online) manipulation. Several scholars have argued that manipulative influence is always hidden. But manipulation is sometimes overt, and when this is acknowledged the distinction between manipulation and other forms of social influence becomes problematic. Therefore, we need a better conceptualisation of manipulation that allows it to be overt and yet clearly distinct (...)
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  • The ethics of digital well-being: a thematic review.Christopher Burr, Mariarosaria Taddeo & Luciano Floridi - 2019 - Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (4):2313–⁠2343.
    This article presents the first thematic review of the literature on the ethical issues concerning digital well-being. The term ‘digital well-being’ is used to refer to the impact of digital technologies on what it means to live a life that isgood fora human being. The review explores the existing literature on the ethics of digital well-being, with the goal of mapping the current debate and identifying open questions for future research. The review identifies major issues related to several key social (...)
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  • Ethics of digital well-being: a multidisciplinary approach.Christopher Burr & Luciano Floridi (eds.) - 2020 - Springer.
    This chapter serves as an introduction to the edited collection of the same name, which includes chapters that explore digital well-being from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, economics, health care, and education. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to provide a short primer on the different disciplinary approaches to the study of well-being. To supplement this primer, we also invited key experts from several disciplines—philosophy, psychology, public policy, and health care—to share their thoughts on what they (...)
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  • Digital Wellness and Persuasive Technologies.Laura Specker Sullivan & Peter Reiner - 2019 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (3):413-424.
    The development of personal technologies has recently shifted from devices that seek to capture user attention to those that aim to improve user well-being. Digital wellness technologies use the same attractive qualities of other persuasive apps to motivate users towards behaviors that are personally and socially valuable, such as exercise, wealth-management, and meaningful communication. While these aims are certainly an improvement over the market-driven motivations of earlier technologies, they retain their predecessors’ focus on influencing user behavior as a primary metric (...)
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  • Recommender systems and their ethical challenges.Silvia Milano, Mariarosaria Taddeo & Luciano Floridi - 2020 - AI and Society (4):957-967.
    This article presents the first, systematic analysis of the ethical challenges posed by recommender systems through a literature review. The article identifies six areas of concern, and maps them onto a proposed taxonomy of different kinds of ethical impact. The analysis uncovers a gap in the literature: currently user-centred approaches do not consider the interests of a variety of other stakeholders—as opposed to just the receivers of a recommendation—in assessing the ethical impacts of a recommender system.
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  • Algorithmic Recommender Systems.Susan Kennedy - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (4):327-338.
    Despite their ethical challenges, recommender systems (RS) are widely endorsed as a necessary solution to the problem of information overload. After clarifying how the harmful effects of information overload can be characterized in distinct ways, I explore the often overlooked potential benefits of abundant online spaces. I argue that these spaces afford valuable opportunities to experience spontaneous freedom. I then put forth a more comprehensive evaluation of the role RS should assume in algorithmically structuring the online space. This evaluation aims (...)
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  • Is Epistemic Autonomy Technologically Possible Within Social Media? A Socio-Epistemological Investigation of the Epistemic Opacity of Social Media Platforms.Margherita Mattioni - forthcoming - Topoi:1-14.
    This article aims to provide a coherent and comprehensive theoretical framework of the main socio-epistemic features of social media. The first part consists of a concise discussion of the main epistemic consequences of personalised information filtering, with a focus on echo chambers and their many different implications. The middle section instead hosts an analytical investigation of the cognitive and epistemic environments of these platforms aimed at establishing whether, and to what extent, they allow their users to be epistemically vigilant with (...)
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  • The Overuse of Digital Technologies: Human Weaknesses, Design Strategies and Ethical Concerns.Marco Fasoli - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (4):1409-1427.
    This is an interdisciplinary article providing an account of a phenomenon that is quite widespread but has been thus far mostly neglected by scholars: the overuse of digital technologies. Digital overuse can be defined as a usage of digital technologies that subjects perceive as dissatisfactory and non-meaningful a posteriori. DO has often been implicitly conceived as one of the main obstacle to so-called digital well-being. The article is structured in two parts. The first provides a definition of the phenomenon and (...)
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  • (1 other version)On Social Machines for Algorithmic Regulation.Nello Cristianini & Teresa Scantamburlo - manuscript
    Autonomous mechanisms have been proposed to regulate certain aspects of society and are already being used to regulate business organisations. We take seriously recent proposals for algorithmic regulation of society, and we identify the existing technologies that can be used to implement them, most of them originally introduced in business contexts. We build on the notion of 'social machine' and we connect it to various ongoing trends and ideas, including crowdsourced task-work, social compiler, mechanism design, reputation management systems, and social (...)
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  • Can Machines Read our Minds?Christopher Burr & Nello Cristianini - 2019 - Minds and Machines 29 (3):461-494.
    We explore the question of whether machines can infer information about our psychological traits or mental states by observing samples of our behaviour gathered from our online activities. Ongoing technical advances across a range of research communities indicate that machines are now able to access this information, but the extent to which this is possible and the consequent implications have not been well explored. We begin by highlighting the urgency of asking this question, and then explore its conceptual underpinnings, in (...)
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  • Digital Slot Machines: Social Media Platforms as Attentional Scaffolds.Cristina Voinea, Lavinia Marin & Constantin Vică - forthcoming - Topoi:1-11.
    In this paper we introduce the concept of attentional scaffolds and show the resemblance between social media platforms and slot machines, both functioning as hostile attentional scaffolds. The first section establishes the groundwork for the concept of attentional scaffolds and draws parallels to the mechanics of slot machines, to argue that social media platforms aim to capture users’ attention to maximize engagement through a system of intermittent rewards. The second section shifts focus to the interplay between emotions and attention, revealing (...)
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  • Wrongful Rational Persuasion Online.Thomas Mitchell & Thomas Douglas - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (1):1-25.
    In this article, we argue that rational persuasion can be a _pro tanto_ wrong and that online platforms possess features that are especially conducive to this wrong. We begin by setting out an account of rational persuasion. This consists of four jointly sufficient conditions for rational persuasion and is intended to capture the core, uncontroversial cases of such persuasion. We then discuss a series of wrong-making features which are present in methods of influence commonly thought of as _pro tanto_ wrong, (...)
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  • On and beyond artifacts in moral relations: accounting for power and violence in Coeckelbergh’s social relationism.Fabio Tollon & Kiasha Naidoo - 2023 - AI and Society 38 (6):2609-2618.
    The ubiquity of technology in our lives and its culmination in artificial intelligence raises questions about its role in our moral considerations. In this paper, we address a moral concern in relation to technological systems given their deep integration in our lives. Coeckelbergh develops a social-relational account, suggesting that it can point us toward a dynamic, historicised evaluation of moral concern. While agreeing with Coeckelbergh’s move away from grounding moral concern in the ontological properties of entities, we suggest that it (...)
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  • Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in Marketing for Social Good—An Ethical Perspective.Erik Hermann - 2022 - Journal of Business Ethics 179 (1):43-61.
    Artificial intelligence is shaping strategy, activities, interactions, and relationships in business and specifically in marketing. The drawback of the substantial opportunities AI systems and applications provide in marketing are ethical controversies. Building on the literature on AI ethics, the authors systematically scrutinize the ethical challenges of deploying AI in marketing from a multi-stakeholder perspective. By revealing interdependencies and tensions between ethical principles, the authors shed light on the applicability of a purely principled, deontological approach to AI ethics in marketing. To (...)
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  • Digitally Scaffolded Vulnerability: Facebook’s Recommender System as an Affective Scaffold and a Tool for Mind Invasion.Giacomo Figà-Talamanca - 2024 - Topoi 43 (3).
    I aim to illustrate how the recommender systems of digital platforms create a particularly problematic kind of vulnerability in their users. Specifically, through theories of scaffolded cognition and scaffolded affectivity, I argue that a digital platform’s recommender system is a cognitive and affective artifact that fulfills different functions for the platform’s users and its designers. While it acts as a content provider and facilitator of cognitive, affective and decision-making processes for users, it also provides a continuous and detailed amount of (...)
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  • Living with AI personal assistant: an ethical appraisal.Lorraine K. C. Yeung, Cecilia S. Y. Tam, Sam S. S. Lau & Mandy M. Ko - forthcoming - AI and Society:1-16.
    Mark Coeckelbergh (Int J Soc Robot 1:217–221, 2009) argues that robot ethics should investigate what interaction with robots can do to humans rather than focusing on the robot’s moral status. We should ask what robots do to our sociality and whether human–robot interaction can contribute to the human good and human flourishing. This paper extends Coeckelbergh’s call and investigate what it means to live with disembodied AI-powered agents. We address the following question: Can the human–AI interaction contribute to our moral (...)
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  • The decision-point-dilemma: Yet another problem of responsibility in human-AI interaction.Laura Crompton - 2021 - Journal of Responsible Technology 7:100013.
    AI as decision support supposedly helps human agents make ‘better’decisions more efficiently. However, research shows that it can, sometimes greatly, influence the decisions of its human users. While there has been a fair amount of research on intended AI influence, there seem to be great gaps within both theoretical and practical studies concerning unintended AI influence. In this paper I aim to address some of these gaps, and hope to shed some light on the ethical and moral concerns that arise (...)
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  • Towards a Theory of Digital Well-Being: Reimagining Online Life After Lockdown.Matthew J. Dennis - 2021 - Science and Engineering Ethics 27 (3):1-19.
    Global lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic have offered many people first-hand experience of how their daily online activities threaten their digital well-being. This article begins by critically evaluating the current approaches to digital well-being offered by ethicists of technology, NGOs, and social media corporations. My aim is to explain why digital well-being needs to be reimagined within a new conceptual paradigm. After this, I lay the foundations for such an alternative approach, one that shows how current digital well-being initiatives can (...)
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  • Digital well-being under pandemic conditions: catalysing a theory of online flourishing.Matthew J. Dennis - 2021 - Ethics and Information Technology 23 (3):435-445.
    The COVID-19 pandemic has catalysed what may soon become a permanent digital transition in the domains of work, education, medicine, and leisure. This transition has also precipitated a spike in concern regarding our digital well-being. Prominent lobbying groups, such as the Center for Humane Technology, have responded to this concern. In April 2020, the CHT has offered a set of ‘Digital Well-Being Guidelines during the COVID-19 Pandemic.’ These guidelines offer a rule-based approach to digital well-being, one which aims to mitigate (...)
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  • AI-powered recommender systems and the preservation of personal autonomy.Juan Ignacio del Valle & Francisco Lara - 2024 - AI and Society 39 (5):2479-2491.
    Recommender Systems (RecSys) have been around since the early days of the Internet, helping users navigate the vast ocean of information and the increasingly available options that have been available for us ever since. The range of tasks for which one could use a RecSys is expanding as the technical capabilities grow, with the disruption of Machine Learning representing a tipping point in this domain, as in many others. However, the increase of the technical capabilities of AI-powered RecSys did not (...)
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  • (1 other version)On social machines for algorithmic regulation.Nello Cristianini & Teresa Scantamburlo - 2020 - AI and Society 35 (3):645-662.
    Autonomous mechanisms have been proposed to regulate certain aspects of society and are already being used to regulate business organisations. We take seriously recent proposals for algorithmic regulation of society, and we identify the existing technologies that can be used to implement them, most of them originally introduced in business contexts. We build on the notion of ‘social machine’ and we connect it to various ongoing trends and ideas, including crowdsourced task-work, social compiler, mechanism design, reputation management systems, and social (...)
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  • Normative folk psychology and decision theory.Joe Dewhurst & Christopher Burr - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (4):525-542.
    Our aim in this paper is to explore two possible directions of interaction between normative folk psychology and decision theory. In one direction, folk psychology plays a regulative role that constrains practical decision‐making. In the other direction, decision theory provides novel tools and norms that shape folk psychology. We argue that these interactions could lead to the emergence of an iterative “decision theoretic spiral," where folk psychology influences decision‐making, decision‐making is studied by decision theory, and decision theory influences folk psychology. (...)
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  • The Moral Permissibility of Digital Nudging in the Workplace: Reconciling Justification and Legitimation.Rebecca C. Ruehle - 2023 - Business Ethics Quarterly 33 (3):502-531.
    Organisations increasingly use digital nudges to influence their workforces’ behaviour without coercion or incentives. This can expose employees to arbitrary domination by infringing on their autonomy through manipulation and indoctrination. Nudges might furthermore give rise to the phenomenon of “organised immaturity.” Adopting a balanced approach between overly optimistic and dystopian standpoints, I propose a framework for determining the moral permissibility of digital nudging in the workplace. In this regard, I argue that not only should organisations provide pre-discursive justification of nudges (...)
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  • (1 other version)Artifacts and affordances: from designed properties to possibilities for action.Fabio Tollon - 2022 - AI and Society 37 (1):239-248.
    In this paper I critically evaluate the value neutrality thesis regarding technology, and find it wanting. I then introduce the various ways in which artifacts can come to influence moral value, and our evaluation of moral situations and actions. Here, following van de Poel and Kroes, I introduce the idea of value sensitive design. Specifically, I show how by virtue of their designed properties, artifacts may come to embody values. Such accounts, however, have several shortcomings. In agreement with Michael Klenk, (...)
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  • Trust as a Test for Unethical Persuasive Design.Johnny Brennan - 2020 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (4):767-783.
    Persuasive design draws on our basic psychological makeup to build products that make our engagement with them habitual. It uses variable rewards, creates Fear of Missing Out, and leverages social approval to incrementally increase and maintain user engagement. Social media and networking platforms, video games, and slot machines are all examples of persuasive technologies. Recent attention has focused on the dangers of PD: It can deceptively prod users into forming habits that help the company’s bottom line but not the user’s (...)
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