This paper reviews the intriguing history of information and computer ethics. Information ethics began as a branch of applied ethics concerned with the responsible management of information resources, while computer ethics was originally concerned with the training of computer professionals. Thanks to the Internet and the Web, these two fields merged together as access and communications issues became more prominent. In more recent years, responding to the ongoing debate about this discipline's structural foundations, philosophers like Floridi have given information ethics (...) a new meaning by focusing on information's ontological status and the intrinsic worth of all information objects. (shrink)

Cohen (2023) takes a fair and measured approach to the question of what ChatGPT means for bioethics. The hype cycles around AI often obscure the fact that ethicists have developed robust frameworks...

Empirical research into the ethics of emerging technologies, often involving foresight studies, technology assessment or application of the precautionary principle, raises significant epistemological challenges by failing to explain the relative epistemic status of contentious normative claims about future states. This weakness means that it is unclear why the conclusions reached by these approaches should be considered valid, for example in anticipatory ethical assessment or governance of emerging technologies. This paper explains and responds to this problem by proposing an account of (...) how the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims can be established in ethical and political discourses based on Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics. To better understand the nature of the problem, the relationship between norms, facts and the future is explored in light of potential meta-ethical fallacies faced in the field of empirical ethics. Weaknesses of current approaches to anticipatory ethical assessment and governance are then explored, including the Precautionary Principle and Technology Assessment. We argue that the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims can be understood within Habermas’ approach to political discourse, which requires ‘translation’ of uncertain claims to be comprehensible to other stakeholders in discourse. Translation thus provides a way to allow for uncertain normative claims to be considered alongside other types of validity claims in discourse. The paper contributes a conceptual account of the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims in discourse and begins to develop a ‘methodology of translation’ which can be further developed for approaches to research and ethical assessment supporting anticipatory evidence-based policy, governance and system design. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence research and regulation seek to balance the benefits of innovation against any potential harms and disruption. However, one unintended consequence of the recent surge in AI research is the potential re-orientation of AI technologies to facilitate criminal acts, term in this article AI-Crime. AIC is theoretically feasible thanks to published experiments in automating fraud targeted at social media users, as well as demonstrations of AI-driven manipulation of simulated markets. However, because AIC is still a relatively young and inherently (...) interdisciplinary area—spanning socio-legal studies to formal science—there is little certainty of what an AIC future might look like. This article offers the first systematic, interdisciplinary literature analysis of the foreseeable threats of AIC, providing ethicists, policy-makers, and law enforcement organisations with a synthesis of the current problems, and a possible solution space. (shrink)

This essay looks askance at how robot-assisted childcare is constructed in the public domain of the Internet. Complex interactions of rhetorical manoeuvres, narratives and postnarrativity, and semiotic slippages may channel the apperception of this application of robotics. The prospect of robots in childcare roles is exceptionally contentious, for it connotes interference with the child-caregiver attachment bond. The industry’s response to psychology-informed concerns is to ‘rebrand’ the product as a robot companion for a child or as a home robot for the (...) family. A technocentric bias in information disseminated online creates an illusion of expertise and may endorse technology-driven morality. (shrink)

Cognitive technology is an umbrella term sometimes used to designate the realm of technologies that assist, augment or simulate cognitive processes or that can be used for the achievement of cognitive aims. This technological macro-domain encompasses both devices that directly interface the human brain as well as external systems that use artificial intelligence to simulate or assist (aspects of) human cognition. As they hold the promise of assisting and augmenting human cognitive capabilities both individually and collectively, cognitive technologies could produce, (...) in the next decades, a significant effect on human cultural evolution. At the same time, due to their dual-use potential, they are vulnerable to being coopted by State and non-State actors for non-benign purposes (e.g. cyberterrorism, cyberwarfare and mass surveillance) or in manners that violate democratic values and principles. Therefore, it is the responsibility of technology governance bodies to align the future of cognitive technology with democratic principles such as individual freedom, avoidance of centralized, equality of opportunity and open development. This paper provides a preliminary description of an approach to the democratization of cognitive technologies based on six normative ethical principles: avoidance of centralized control, openness, transparency, inclusiveness, user-centeredness and convergence. This approach is designed to universalize and evenly distribute the potential benefits of cognitive technology and mitigate the risk that such emerging technological trend could be coopted by State or non-State actors in ways that are inconsistent with the principles of liberal democracy or detrimental to individuals and groups. (shrink)

This paper describes the role of information architecture in the design of socially sustainable pervasive information spaces. The framing of information architecture as an essential part of Design Thinking extends current and historic notions of the field of information architecture. The discussion introduces the notion of the ‘contrived ontology’ which can be understood as the intentional meaning that design infuses in its artefacts, services and systems. Further, we argue that contrived ontology aligns with central themes within humanistic frameworks which view (...) reality as subjective construct. This forms the central theoretical meditation herein: we contend that while design is always an act of interpreted cultural determination, at the scale of Floridi’s infosphere, the immediacy and immersive social reality of technology will become frictionless within our human experience. As this occurs, there is a moral and ethical imperative to ensure social sustainability and to this end that the meanings and intentions that inform the mature design of our human-made world are visible and accountable. It is towards this end that information architecture can make a valuable contribution. (shrink)

Certain research strands can yield “forbidden knowledge”. This term refers to knowledge that is considered too sensitive, dangerous or taboo to be produced or shared. Discourses about such publication restrictions are already entrenched in scientific fields like IT security, synthetic biology or nuclear physics research. This paper makes the case for transferring this discourse to machine learning research. Some machine learning applications can very easily be misused and unfold harmful consequences, for instance, with regard to generative video or text synthesis, (...) personality analysis, behavior manipulation, software vulnerability detection and the like. Up till now, the machine learning research community embraces the idea of open access. However, this is opposed to precautionary efforts to prevent the malicious use of machine learning applications. Information about or from such applications may, if improperly disclosed, cause harm to people, organizations or whole societies. Hence, the goal of this work is to outline deliberations on how to deal with questions concerning the dissemination of such information. It proposes a tentative ethical framework for the machine learning community on how to deal with forbidden knowledge and dual-use applications. (shrink)

In October 2016, the White House, the European Parliament, and the UK House of Commons each issued a report outlining their visions on how to prepare society for the widespread use of artificial intelligence. In this article, we provide a comparative assessment of these three reports in order to facilitate the design of policies favourable to the development of a ‘good AI society’. To do so, we examine how each report addresses the following three topics: the development of a ‘good (...) AI society’; the role and responsibility of the government, the private sector, and the research community in pursuing such a development; and where the recommendations to support such a development may be in need of improvement. Our analysis concludes that the reports address adequately various ethical, social, and economic topics, but come short of providing an overarching political vision and long-term strategy for the development of a ‘good AI society’. In order to contribute to fill this gap, in the conclusion we suggest a two-pronged approach. (shrink)

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to renewed ambitions of developing artificial general intelligence. Alongside this has been a resurgence in the development of virtual and augmented reality (V/AR) technologies, which are viewed as “disruptive” technologies and the computing platforms of the future. V/AR effectively bring the digital world of machines, robots, and artificial agents to our senses while entailing the transposition of human activity and presence into the digital world of artificial agents and machine forms of (...) intelligence. The intersection of humans and machines in this shared space brings humans and machines into ontological continuity as informational entities in a totalizing informational environment, which subsumes both cyber and physical space in an artificially constructed virtual world. The reconstruction of mind (through AI) and world (through V/AR) thus has significant epistemological, ontological, and anthropological implications, which constitute the underlying features in the artificialization of mind and world. (shrink)

As Cohen (2023) describes, the discourse around ChatGPT has been focused on potential risks while AI-based chatbots could also positively empower patients. There are other potential benefits to Cha...

Philosophers of information, according to Luciano Floridi (The philosophy of information. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, p 32), study how information should be “adequately created, processed, managed, and used.” A small number of epistemologists have employed the concept of information as a cornerstone of their theoretical framework. How this concept can be used to make sense of seemingly intractable epistemological problems, however, has not been widely explored. This paper examines Fred Dretske’s information-based epistemology, in particular his response to radical epistemological (...) skepticism. We discuss the relationship between information, evidence and knowledge in relation to the problem of skepticism and the options available to an information-based epistemology for dealing with it. (shrink)

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and (...) subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger. (shrink)