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  1. Reliability in Machine Learning.Thomas Grote, Konstantin Genin & Emily Sullivan - forthcoming - Philosophy Compass.
    Issues of reliability are claiming center-stage in the epistemology of machine learning. This paper unifies different branches in the literature and points to promising research directions, whilst also providing an accessible introduction to key concepts in statistics and machine learning---as far as they are concerned with reliability.
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  • From AI Ethics Principles to Practices: A Teleological Methodology to Apply AI Ethics Principles in The Defence Domain.Christopher Thomas, Alexander Blanchard & Mariarosaria Taddeo - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (1):1-21.
    This article provides a methodology for the interpretation of AI ethics principles to specify ethical criteria for the development and deployment of AI systems in high-risk domains. The methodology consists of a three-step process deployed by an independent, multi-stakeholder ethics board to: (1) identify the appropriate level of abstraction for modelling the AI lifecycle; (2) interpret prescribed principles to extract specific requirements to be met at each step of the AI lifecycle; and (3) define the criteria to inform purpose- and (...)
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  • On the Philosophy of Unsupervised Learning.David S. Watson - 2023 - Philosophy and Technology 36 (2):1-26.
    Unsupervised learning algorithms are widely used for many important statistical tasks with numerous applications in science and industry. Yet despite their prevalence, they have attracted remarkably little philosophical scrutiny to date. This stands in stark contrast to supervised and reinforcement learning algorithms, which have been widely studied and critically evaluated, often with an emphasis on ethical concerns. In this article, I analyze three canonical unsupervised learning problems: clustering, abstraction, and generative modeling. I argue that these methods raise unique epistemological and (...)
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  • Conceptual challenges for interpretable machine learning.David S. Watson - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-33.
    As machine learning has gradually entered into ever more sectors of public and private life, there has been a growing demand for algorithmic explainability. How can we make the predictions of complex statistical models more intelligible to end users? A subdiscipline of computer science known as interpretable machine learning (IML) has emerged to address this urgent question. Numerous influential methods have been proposed, from local linear approximations to rule lists and counterfactuals. In this article, I highlight three conceptual challenges that (...)
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  • Defining the undefinable: the black box problem in healthcare artificial intelligence.Jordan Joseph Wadden - 2022 - Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (10):764-768.
    The ‘black box problem’ is a long-standing talking point in debates about artificial intelligence. This is a significant point of tension between ethicists, programmers, clinicians and anyone else working on developing AI for healthcare applications. However, the precise definition of these systems are often left undefined, vague, unclear or are assumed to be standardised within AI circles. This leads to situations where individuals working on AI talk over each other and has been invoked in numerous debates between opaque and explainable (...)
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  • Levels of explicability for medical artificial intelligence: What do we normatively need and what can we technically reach?Frank Ursin, Felix Lindner, Timo Ropinski, Sabine Salloch & Cristian Timmermann - 2023 - Ethik in der Medizin 35 (2):173-199.
    Definition of the problem The umbrella term “explicability” refers to the reduction of opacity of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. These efforts are challenging for medical AI applications because higher accuracy often comes at the cost of increased opacity. This entails ethical tensions because physicians and patients desire to trace how results are produced without compromising the performance of AI systems. The centrality of explicability within the informed consent process for medical AI systems compels an ethical reflection on the trade-offs. Which (...)
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  • Algorithms Don’t Have A Future: On the Relation of Judgement and Calculation.Daniel Stader - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (1):1-29.
    This paper is about the opposite of judgement and calculation. This opposition has been a traditional anchor of critiques concerned with the rise of AI decision making over human judgement. Contrary to these approaches, it is argued that human judgement is not and cannot be replaced by calculation, but that it is human judgement that contextualises computational structures and gives them meaning and purpose. The article focuses on the epistemic structure of algorithms and artificial neural networks to find that they (...)
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  • ML interpretability: Simple isn't easy.Tim Räz - 2024 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 103 (C):159-167.
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  • Understanding Deep Learning with Statistical Relevance.Tim Räz - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (1):20-41.
    This paper argues that a notion of statistical explanation, based on Salmon’s statistical relevance model, can help us better understand deep neural networks. It is proved that homogeneous partitions, the core notion of Salmon’s model, are equivalent to minimal sufficient statistics, an important notion from statistical inference. This establishes a link to deep neural networks via the so-called Information Bottleneck method, an information-theoretic framework, according to which deep neural networks implicitly solve an optimization problem that generalizes minimal sufficient statistics. The (...)
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  • Explanatory pragmatism: a context-sensitive framework for explainable medical AI.Diana Robinson & Rune Nyrup - 2022 - Ethics and Information Technology 24 (1).
    Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is an emerging, multidisciplinary field of research that seeks to develop methods and tools for making AI systems more explainable or interpretable. XAI researchers increasingly recognise explainability as a context-, audience- and purpose-sensitive phenomenon, rather than a single well-defined property that can be directly measured and optimised. However, since there is currently no overarching definition of explainability, this poses a risk of miscommunication between the many different researchers within this multidisciplinary space. This is the problem we (...)
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  • Humanistic interpretation and machine learning.Juho Pääkkönen & Petri Ylikoski - 2021 - Synthese 199:1461–1497.
    This paper investigates how unsupervised machine learning methods might make hermeneutic interpretive text analysis more objective in the social sciences. Through a close examination of the uses of topic modeling—a popular unsupervised approach in the social sciences—it argues that the primary way in which unsupervised learning supports interpretation is by allowing interpreters to discover unanticipated information in larger and more diverse corpora and by improving the transparency of the interpretive process. This view highlights that unsupervised modeling does not eliminate the (...)
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  • Sources of Understanding in Supervised Machine Learning Models.Paulo Pirozelli - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (2):1-19.
    In the last decades, supervised machine learning has seen the widespread growth of highly complex, non-interpretable models, of which deep neural networks are the most typical representative. Due to their complexity, these models have showed an outstanding performance in a series of tasks, as in image recognition and machine translation. Recently, though, there has been an important discussion over whether those non-interpretable models are able to provide any sort of understanding whatsoever. For some scholars, only interpretable models can provide understanding. (...)
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  • Ethics as a service: a pragmatic operationalisation of AI ethics.Jessica Morley, Anat Elhalal, Francesca Garcia, Libby Kinsey, Jakob Mökander & Luciano Floridi - 2021 - Minds and Machines 31 (2):239–256.
    As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence, in particular machine learning, has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the theory of (...)
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  • AI, Explainability and Public Reason: The Argument from the Limitations of the Human Mind.Jocelyn Maclure - 2021 - Minds and Machines 31 (3):421-438.
    Machine learning-based AI algorithms lack transparency. In this article, I offer an interpretation of AI’s explainability problem and highlight its ethical saliency. I try to make the case for the legal enforcement of a strong explainability requirement: human organizations which decide to automate decision-making should be legally obliged to demonstrate the capacity to explain and justify the algorithmic decisions that have an impact on the wellbeing, rights, and opportunities of those affected by the decisions. This legal duty can be derived (...)
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  • People Prefer Moral Discretion to Algorithms: Algorithm Aversion Beyond Intransparency.Johanna Jauernig, Matthias Uhl & Gari Walkowitz - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (1):1-25.
    We explore aversion to the use of algorithms in moral decision-making. So far, this aversion has been explained mainly by the fear of opaque decisions that are potentially biased. Using incentivized experiments, we study which role the desire for human discretion in moral decision-making plays. This seems justified in light of evidence suggesting that people might not doubt the quality of algorithmic decisions, but still reject them. In our first study, we found that people prefer humans with decision-making discretion to (...)
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  • On the Ethical and Epistemological Utility of Explicable AI in Medicine.Christian Herzog - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (2):1-31.
    In this article, I will argue in favor of both the ethical and epistemological utility of explanations in artificial intelligence -based medical technology. I will build on the notion of “explicability” due to Floridi, which considers both the intelligibility and accountability of AI systems to be important for truly delivering AI-powered services that strengthen autonomy, beneficence, and fairness. I maintain that explicable algorithms do, in fact, strengthen these ethical principles in medicine, e.g., in terms of direct patient–physician contact, as well (...)
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  • Allure of Simplicity.Thomas Grote - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1).
    This paper develops an account of the opacity problem in medical machine learning (ML). Guided by pragmatist assumptions, I argue that opacity in ML models is problematic insofar as it potentially undermines the achievement of two key purposes: ensuring generalizability and optimizing clinician–machine decision-making. Three opacity amelioration strategies are examined, with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) as the predominant approach, challenged by two revisionary strategies in the form of reliabilism and the interpretability by design. Comparing the three strategies, I argue that (...)
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  • What we owe to decision-subjects: beyond transparency and explanation in automated decision-making.David Gray Grant, Jeff Behrends & John Basl - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 2003:1-31.
    The ongoing explosion of interest in artificial intelligence is fueled in part by recently developed techniques in machine learning. Those techniques allow automated systems to process huge amounts of data, utilizing mathematical methods that depart from traditional statistical approaches, and resulting in impressive advancements in our ability to make predictions and uncover correlations across a host of interesting domains. But as is now widely discussed, the way that those systems arrive at their outputs is often opaque, even to the experts (...)
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  • The Deception of Certainty: how Non-Interpretable Machine Learning Outcomes Challenge the Epistemic Authority of Physicians. A deliberative-relational Approach.Florian Funer - 2022 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 25 (2):167-178.
    Developments in Machine Learning (ML) have attracted attention in a wide range of healthcare fields to improve medical practice and the benefit of patients. Particularly, this should be achieved by providing more or less automated decision recommendations to the treating physician. However, some hopes placed in ML for healthcare seem to be disappointed, at least in part, by a lack of transparency or traceability. Skepticism exists primarily in the fact that the physician, as the person responsible for diagnosis, therapy, and (...)
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  • Accuracy and Interpretability: Struggling with the Epistemic Foundations of Machine Learning-Generated Medical Information and Their Practical Implications for the Doctor-Patient Relationship.Florian Funer - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (1):1-20.
    The initial successes in recent years in harnessing machine learning technologies to improve medical practice and benefit patients have attracted attention in a wide range of healthcare fields. Particularly, it should be achieved by providing automated decision recommendations to the treating clinician. Some hopes placed in such ML-based systems for healthcare, however, seem to be unwarranted, at least partially because of their inherent lack of transparency, although their results seem convincing in accuracy and reliability. Skepticism arises when the physician as (...)
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  • The epistemological foundations of data science: a critical review.Luciano Floridi, Mariarosaria Taddeo, Vincent Wang, David Watson & Jules Desai - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-27.
    The modern abundance and prominence of data have led to the development of “data science” as a new field of enquiry, along with a body of epistemological reflections upon its foundations, methods, and consequences. This article provides a systematic analysis and critical review of significant open problems and debates in the epistemology of data science. We propose a partition of the epistemology of data science into the following five domains: (i) the constitution of data science; (ii) the kind of enquiry (...)
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  • Understanding, Idealization, and Explainable AI.Will Fleisher - 2022 - Episteme 19 (4):534-560.
    Many AI systems that make important decisions are black boxes: how they function is opaque even to their developers. This is due to their high complexity and to the fact that they are trained rather than programmed. Efforts to alleviate the opacity of black box systems are typically discussed in terms of transparency, interpretability, and explainability. However, there is little agreement about what these key concepts mean, which makes it difficult to adjudicate the success or promise of opacity alleviation methods. (...)
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  • Algorithmic bias: Senses, sources, solutions.Sina Fazelpour & David Danks - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (8):e12760.
    Data‐driven algorithms are widely used to make or assist decisions in sensitive domains, including healthcare, social services, education, hiring, and criminal justice. In various cases, such algorithms have preserved or even exacerbated biases against vulnerable communities, sparking a vibrant field of research focused on so‐called algorithmic biases. This research includes work on identification, diagnosis, and response to biases in algorithm‐based decision‐making. This paper aims to facilitate the application of philosophical analysis to these contested issues by providing an overview of three (...)
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  • What is Interpretability?Adrian Erasmus, Tyler D. P. Brunet & Eyal Fisher - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology 34:833–862.
    We argue that artificial networks are explainable and offer a novel theory of interpretability. Two sets of conceptual questions are prominent in theoretical engagements with artificial neural networks, especially in the context of medical artificial intelligence: Are networks explainable, and if so, what does it mean to explain the output of a network? And what does it mean for a network to be interpretable? We argue that accounts of “explanation” tailored specifically to neural networks have ineffectively reinvented the wheel. In (...)
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  • I, Volkswagen.Stephanie Collins - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):283-304.
    Philosophers increasingly argue that collective agents can be blameworthy for wrongdoing. Advocates tend to endorse functionalism, on which collectives are analogous to complicated robots. This is puzzling: we don’t hold robots blameworthy. I argue we don’t hold robots blameworthy because blameworthiness presupposes the capacity for a mental state I call ‘moral self-awareness’. This raises a new problem for collective blameworthiness: collectives seem to lack the capacity for moral self-awareness. I solve the problem by giving an account of how collectives have (...)
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  • A Means-End Account of Explainable Artificial Intelligence.Oliver Buchholz - 2023 - Synthese 202 (33):1-23.
    Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) seeks to produce explanations for those machine learning methods which are deemed opaque. However, there is considerable disagreement about what this means and how to achieve it. Authors disagree on what should be explained (topic), to whom something should be explained (stakeholder), how something should be explained (instrument), and why something should be explained (goal). In this paper, I employ insights from means-end epistemology to structure the field. According to means-end epistemology, different means ought to be (...)
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  • Philosophy of science at sea: Clarifying the interpretability of machine learning.Claus Beisbart & Tim Räz - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (6):e12830.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 6, June 2022.
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  • Ethics as a service: a pragmatic operationalisation of AI ethics.Jessica Morley, Anat Elhalal, Francesca Garcia, Libby Kinsey, Jakob Mökander & Luciano Floridi - manuscript
    As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular machine learning (ML), has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the (...)
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  • Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Safety: practical tools for creating "good" models.Nicholas Kluge Corrêa -
    The AI Robotics Ethics Society (AIRES) is a non-profit organization founded in 2018 by Aaron Hui to promote awareness and the importance of ethical implementation and regulation of AI. AIRES is now an organization with chapters at universities such as UCLA (Los Angeles), USC (University of Southern California), Caltech (California Institute of Technology), Stanford University, Cornell University, Brown University, and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). AIRES at PUCRS is the first international chapter of AIRES, and (...)
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  • Ética e Segurança da Inteligência Artificial: ferramentas práticas para se criar "bons" modelos.Nicholas Kluge Corrêa - manuscript
    A AI Robotics Ethics Society (AIRES) é uma organização sem fins lucrativos fundada em 2018 por Aaron Hui, com o objetivo de se promover a conscientização e a importância da implementação e regulamentação ética da AI. A AIRES é hoje uma organização com capítulos em universidade como UCLA (Los Angeles), USC (University of Southern California), Caltech (California Institute of Technology), Stanford University, Cornell University, Brown University e a Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (Brasil). AIRES na PUCRS é (...)
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