The popularisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has sparked discussion about their ethical implications. This development has forced governmental organisations, NGOs, and private companies to react and draft ethics guidelines for future development of ethical AI systems. Whereas many ethics guidelines address values familiar to ethicists, they seem to lack in ethical justifications. Furthermore, most tend to neglect the impact of AI on democracy, governance, and public deliberation. Existing research suggest, however, that AI can threaten key elements of western democracies (...) that are ethically relevant. In this paper, Rawls’s theory of justice is applied to draft a set of guidelines for organisations and policy-makers to guide AI development towards a more ethical direction. The goal is to contribute to the broadening of the discussion on AI ethics by exploring the possibility of constructing AI ethics guidelines that are philosophically justified and take a broader perspective of societal justice. The paper discusses how Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness and its key concepts relate to the ongoing developments in AI ethics and gives a proposition of how principles that offer a foundation for operationalising AI ethics in practice could look like if aligned with Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. (shrink)

This Open Peer Commentary on “A Critical Cybernetics” by Klaus Krippendorff outlines that enacting alternative not-yet existing realities goes beyond discourse and can be considered design practice. A Critical Cybernetics for enacting alternative not-yet existing realities, such as Krippendorff proposed, would benefit from associating itself with the expertise in the technicity of society that has been central to cybernetics since its inception.

This paper explores the theme of education and the posthuman from the perspective of French philosophy. It addresses a crisis in eduction today identified by Michel Serres: now that knowledge is widely and freely accessible through information technologies, what is the purpose of education? A response is developed through three conceptual terms prefixed with ‘post’: the postmodern, the posthuman, and through the proposed idea of ‘postinformation.’ The background to the problem is sketched in terms of the ‘postmodern,’ with reference to (...) Lyotard’s influential The Postmodern Condition. A theory of the posthuman, which synthesises Stiegler’s ‘exorganism’ and Floridi’s ‘inforg’, is then sketched in response to Serres’ question of who the subject of education is today. The response to the crisis the paper proposes is that the purpose of education today is not to transmit information, but to help shape posthuman subjects able to process it effectively. This means helping them to learn how to navigate the complex informational networks we now inhabit so that they are able to flourish. The concept of postinformation is designed to help facilitate this educational shift in perspective. Postinformation concerns not just informational content, but the constitutive function of information and information technologies. (shrink)

In times of current crisis, the voices of women are needed more than ever. The accumulation of war and environmental catastrophes teaches us that exploitation of people and nature through violent appropriation and enrichment for the sake of short-term self-interest exacts its price. This book presents contributions on the currently most relevant and most urgent issues: reshaping the economy, environmental problems, technology and the re-reading of history from the non-western and western tradition. With an outlook into the problems of class, (...) race and gender in its intersectional framing, the collection offers a unique overview of current research in these fields and contributes to the renewal and contemporary presentation of feminist thought from partly concrete perspectives with regard to factual issues. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics stand to change many aspects of our lives, including our values. If trends continue as expected, many industries will undergo automation in the near future, calling into question whether we can still value the sense of identity and security our occupations once provided us with. Likewise, the advent of social robots driven by AI, appears to be shifting the meaning of numerous, long-standing values associated with interpersonal relationships, like friendship. Furthermore, powerful actors’ and institutions’ (...) increasing reliance on AI to make decisions that may affect how people live their lives may have a significant impact on privacy while also raising issues about algorithmic transparency and human control. In this paper, building and expanding on previous works, we will look at how the deployment of Artificial Intelligence technology may lead to changes in identity, security, and other crucial values (such as friendship, fairness, and privacy). We will discuss what challenges we may face in the process, while critically reflecting on whether such changes may be desirable. Finally, drawing on a series of considerations underlying virtue ethics, we will formulate a set of preliminary suggestions, which—we hope—can be used to more carefully guide the future roll out of AI technologies for human flourishing; that is, for social and moral good. (shrink)

… in which we pass through eleven episodes in the history of cybernetics, each episode focusing on one of its perspectives on learning. We end with a coda where we define ‘cybersocial systems’ and...

Since the Enlightenment, there have been advocates for the rationalizing efficiency of enlightened sovereigns, bureaucrats, and technocrats. Today these enthusiasms are joined by calls for replacing or augmenting government with algorithms and artificial intelligence, a process already substantially under way. Bureaucracies are in effect algorithms created by technocrats that systematize governance, and their automation simply removes bureaucrats and paper. The growth of algorithmic governance can already be seen in the automation of social services, regulatory oversight, policing, the justice system, and (...) the military. However, there have also always been justified democratic and economic criticisms of autocracy, bureaucracy, technocracy, and algorithmic governance. Bureaucrats, technocrats, and algorithms embody biases that tend to serve the interests of elites, and all require transparency and democratic accountability, oversight individual citizens are ill equipped to exercise. As state apparatuses are increasingly automated, mechanisms for collective action and democratic oversight also need to be automated. Algorithms and cyborg citizenry will enable a posthuman democracy. Democratically accountable algorithmic governance, enabled by artificial intelligence and human enhancement, can automate bottom-up citizen surveillance, inform debate, aggregate decision making, and ensure the efficient working of the gradually withering state. As paid work disappears and we transition to a postcapitalist economy with a universal basic income, market mechanisms can be replaced with democratic planning. Indeed, only algorithmic governance can secure our future against accelerating threats from technological innovation. (shrink)

Within the Computer Science community, many ethical issues have emerged as significant and critical concerns. Computer ethics is an academic field in its own right and there are unique ethical issues associated with information technology. It encompasses a range of issues and concerns including privacy and agency around personal information, Artificial Intelligence and pervasive technology, the Internet of Things and surveillance applications. As computing technology impacts society at an ever growing pace, there are growing calls for more computer ethics content (...) to be included in Computer Science curricula. In this paper we present the results of a survey that polled faculty from Computer Science and related disciplines about teaching practices for computer ethics at their institutions. The survey was completed by respondents from 61 universities across 23 European countries. Participants were surveyed on whether or not computer ethics is taught to Computer Science students at each institution, the reasons why computer ethics is or is not taught, how computer ethics is taught, the background of staff who teach computer ethics and the scope of computer ethics curricula. This paper presents and discusses the results of the survey. (shrink)

Our world is under going an enormous digital transformation. Nearly no area of our social, informational, political, economic, cultural, and biological spheres are left unchanged. What can philosophy contribute as we try to under- stand and think through these changes? How does digitization challenge past ideas of who we are and where we are headed? Where does it leave our ethical aspirations and cherished ideals of democracy, equality, privacy, trust, freedom, and social embeddedness? Who gets to decide, control, and harness (...) the powers of digitization and for which purposes? Epistemologically, do most of us understand these new mediations – and thus fabrics – of our new world? Lastly – how is the new technological landscape shaping not only our living conditions but also our collective imaginary and our self-identities? (shrink)

Important decisions that impact humans lives, livelihoods, and the natural environment are increasingly being automated. Delegating tasks to so-called automated decision-making systems can improve efficiency and enable new solutions. However, these benefits are coupled with ethical challenges. For example, ADMS may produce discriminatory outcomes, violate individual privacy, and undermine human self-determination. New governance mechanisms are thus needed that help organisations design and deploy ADMS in ways that are ethical, while enabling society to reap the full economic and social benefits of (...) automation. In this article, we consider the feasibility and efficacy of ethics-based auditing as a governance mechanism that allows organisations to validate claims made about their ADMS. Building on previous work, we define EBA as a structured process whereby an entity’s present or past behaviour is assessed for consistency with relevant principles or norms. We then offer three contributions to the existing literature. First, we provide a theoretical explanation of how EBA can contribute to good governance by promoting procedural regularity and transparency. Second, we propose seven criteria for how to design and implement EBA procedures successfully. Third, we identify and discuss the conceptual, technical, social, economic, organisational, and institutional constraints associated with EBA. We conclude that EBA should be considered an integral component of multifaced approaches to managing the ethical risks posed by ADMS. (shrink)

Information can be considered as the most fundamental, philosophical, physical and mathematical concept originating from the totality by means of physical and mathematical transcendentalism (the counterpart of philosophical transcendentalism). Classical and quantum information, particularly by their units, bit and qubit, correspond and unify the finite and infinite. As classical information is relevant to finite series and sets, as quantum information, to infinite ones. A fundamental joint relativity of the finite and infinite, of the external and internal is to be investigated. (...) The corresponding invariance is able to define physical action and its quantity only on the basis of information and especially: on the relativity of classical and quantum information. The concept of transcendental time, an epoché in relation to the direction of time arrow can be defined. Its correlate is that information invariant to the finite and infinite, therefore unifying both classical and quantum information. (shrink)

We are easily misguided as to the true nature of Facebook, and tend to treat it simply as a powerful technological instrument in the service of human intentions. We can, however, gain a better picture of it through recourse to the Jewish tradition of the golem, an image of human beings, created by them in a re‐enactment of their own creation by God. It turns into a magic servant in modernity with an inherent dynamic running between its human and its (...) subhuman characteristics. This dynamic is the main cause behind its becoming uncontrollable. In like manner, what is subhuman in Facebook serves its masters and functions under their total control, but also empowers Facebook's increasingly human operation, an algorithm‐based capability which raises growing doubts about what counts as human. Facebook implies the crisis of humanity which coincides with the “death of God,” that is, the obsolescence of the idea of a divine creator. (shrink)

This article compares three models for conceptualizing the political and ethical challenges of contemporary genetics, genomics, and postgenomics. The three analytical approaches are referred to as the state-politics model, the biopolitical model, and the infopolitical model. Each of these models is valuable for different purposes. But comparing these models in terms of their influence in contemporary discussions, the first is by far the dominant approach, the second is gaining in importance, and the third is almost entirely neglected. The widespread neglect (...) of the infopolitical dimensions of genetic sciences focused by the third model is puzzling in light of the fact that genetics, genomics, and postgenomics are all pre-eminent information sciences. The infopolitical model thus aims to bring into clearer view the specific political and ethical problems engendered by this informational nature of the genetic sciences. This model offers a way of understanding how ethically-salient and politically-fraught conceptual assumptions can be embedded in informational architectures such as algorithms and the formats (or data structures) upon which they rely. (shrink)

In this panel, we explore the future of value sensitive design (VSD). The stakes are high. Many in public and private sectors and in civil society are gradually realizing that taking our values seriously implies that we have to ensure that values effectively inform the design of technology which, in turn, shapes people’s lives. Value sensitive design offers a highly developed set of theory, tools, and methods to systematically do so.

This article situates the emergence of cybernetic concepts in postwar French thought within a longer history of struggles surrounding the technocratic reform of French universities, including Marcel Mauss’s failed efforts to establish a large-scale centre for social-scientific research with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the intellectual and administrative endeavours of Claude Lévi-Strauss during the 1940s and 1950s, and the rise of communications research in connection with the Centre d’Études des Communications de Masse (CECMAS). Although semioticians and poststructuralists used cybernetic discourse (...) critically and ironically, I argue that their embrace of a ‘textocratic’ perspective – that is, a theory of power and epistemology as tied to technical inscription – sustained elements of the technocratic reasoning dating back to these 1920s efforts to reform French universities. (shrink)

Today, artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, is structurally dependent on human participation. Technologies such as Deep Learning (DL) leverage networked media infrastructures and human-machine interaction designs to harness users to provide training and verification data. The emergence of DL is therefore based on a fundamental socio-technological transformation of the relationship between humans and machines. Rather than simulating human intelligence, DL-based AIs capture human cognitive abilities, so they are hybrid human-machine apparatuses. From a perspective of media philosophy and social-theoretical critique, I (...) differentiate five types of “media technologies of capture” in AI apparatuses and analyze them as forms of power relations between humans and machines. Finally, I argue that the current hype about AI implies a relational and distributed understanding of (human/artificial) intelligence, which I categorize under the term “cybernetic AI”. This form of AI manifests in socio-technological apparatuses that involve new modes of subjectivation, social control and discrimination of users. (shrink)

Recent developments in science and technology point to the need to unify, and extend, the definition of memory. On the one hand, molecular neurobiology has shown that memory is largely a chemical process, which includes conditioning and any form of stored experience. On the other hand, information technology has led many to claim that cognition is also extended, that is, memory may be stored outside of the brain. In this paper, we review these advances and describe the increasingly accepted extended (...) definition of memory. This definition is largely accepted in neuroscience but not explicitly stated. In the extended definition, memory is the capacity to store and/or retrieve information. Does this new definition of memory mean that everything is now a form of memory? We stress that memory still requires incorporation, that is, a corpore. It is a relationship -- where one biological or chemical process is incorporated into another, and changes both in a permanent way. Looking at natural and biological processes of incorporation can help us think of how incorporation of internal and external memory occurs in cognition. We further argue that, if we accept that there is such a thing as the storage of information outside the brain -- and that this organic, dynamic process can also be called “memory” -- then we open the door to a very different world. The mind is not static. The brain, and the memory it uses, is a work in progress; we are not now who we were then. (shrink)

In previous works, I defined ourselves as informational organisms, or inforgs for short, who forage for, produce, cultivate, curate, process, and consume information (Floridi 2013). Yet, we may also be understood as interfaces, who inhabit and interact with, an environment also made up of data and computational processes. By describing ourselves in such terms, this paper argues that we can better understand several crucial phenomena that characterise our digital age, including marketing and the “marketisation” of political communication. The article concludes (...) by discussing some of the implications for this in political theory. -/- . (shrink)

-/- Shitstorms, Hate Speech oder virale Videos, die zum Klicken, Liken, Teilen bewegen: Die vernetzte Gesellschaft ist von Affekten getrieben und bringt selbst ganz neue Affekte hervor. -/- Die Beiträge des Bandes nehmen die medientechnologischen Entwicklungen unserer Zeit in den Blick und untersuchen sie aus der Perspektive einer kritischen Affekt- und Sozialphilosophie. Sie zeigen: Soziale Medien und digitale Plattformen sind nicht nur Räume des Austauschs, sie erschaffen Affektökonomien – und darin liegt auch ihre Macht. Indem sie neue Formen des sozialen (...) Umgangs stiften und bestimmen, wie wir kommunizieren, verschieben sie auch die politische Topographie. -/- Mit einem Beitrag von Antonio Negri. (shrink)

Purpose – Contemporary technology has been implicated in the rise of perfectionism, a personality trait that is associated with depression, suicide and other ills. is paper explores how technology can be developed to promote an alternative to perfectionism, which is a self- constructionist ethic. Design/methodology/approach – is paper takes the form of a philosophical discussion. A conceptual framework is developed by connecting the literature on perfectionism and personal meaning with discussions in information ethics on the self, the ontic trust and (...) technologies of the self. To illustrate these themes, the example of selfies and self-portraits is discussed. Findings – e self today must be understood as both individualistic and relational, i.e., hybrid; the trouble is balance. To realize balance, the self should be recognized as part of the ontic trust to which all information organisms and objects belong. us technologically-mediated self-care takes on a deeper urgency. e selfie is one example of a technology for self-care that has gone astray (i.e., lost some of its care-conducive aspects), but this can be remedied if selfie-making technology incorporates relevant aspects of self-portraiture. is example provides a path for developing self- constructionist and meaningful technologies more generally. Practical implications – Technology development should proceed with self-care and meaning in mind. e comparison of selfies and self-portraits, situated historically and theoretically, provides some guidance in this regard. Some specific avenues for development are presented. Originality/value – e question of the self has not been much discussed in information ethics. is paper links the self to the ontic trust: the self can be fruitfully understood as an agent within the ontic trust to which we all belong. (shrink)

There has recently been a surge of development in augmented reality (AR) technologies that has led to an ecosystem of hardware and software for AR, including tools for artists and designers to accelerate the design of AR content and experiences without requiring complex programming. AR is viewed as a key “disruptive technology” and future display technologies (such as digital eyewear) will provide seamless continuity between reality and the digitally augmented. This article will argue that the technologization of human perception and (...) experience of reality, coupled with the development of artificial intelligence (AI)–based natural language assistants, may lead to a secular re‐enchantment of the world, in the sense outlined by Charles Taylor, where human existence is shaped through AR inhabited by advanced personal and social AI agents in the form of digital avatars and daemons, and that enchantment has been persistent throughout the formation of modernity and is being rekindled by the integration of AI in the plane of AR. (shrink)

Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...) it different? What sorts of properties do social groups have? Can they have beliefs or intentions? Can they perform actions? And if so, what does it take for a group to believe, intend, or act? -/- Other entities investigated in social ontology include money, corporations, institutions, property, social classes, races, genders, artifacts, artworks, language, and law. It is difficult to delineate a precise scope for the field (see section 2.1). In general, though, the entities explored in social ontology largely overlap with those that social scientists work on. A good deal of the work in social ontology takes place within the social sciences (see sections 5.1–5.8). -/- Social ontology also addresses more basic questions about the nature of the social world. One set of questions pertains to the constituents, or building blocks, of social things in general. For instance, some theories argue that social entities are built out of the psychological states of individual people, while others argue that they are built out of actions, and yet others that they are built out of practices. Still other theories deny that a distinction can even be made between the social and the non-social. -/- A different set of questions pertains to how social categories are constructed or set up. Are social categories and kinds produced by our attitudes? By our language? Are they produced by causal patterns? And is there just one way social categories are set up, or are there many varieties of social construction? -/- The term ‘social ontology’ has only come into wide currency in recent years, but the nature of the social has been a topic of inquiry since ancient Greece. As a whole, the field can be understood as a branch of metaphysics, the general inquiry into the nature of entities. (shrink)

The machine-organism analogy has played a pivotal role in the history of Western philosophy and science. Notwithstanding its apparent simplicity, it hides complex epistemological issues about the status of both organism and machine and the nature of their interaction. What is the real object of this analogy: organisms as a whole, their parts or, rather, bodily functions? How can the machine serve as a model for interpreting biological phenomena, cognitive processes, or more broadly the social and cultural transformations of the (...) relations between individuals, and between individuals and the environments in which they live? Wired Bodies. New Perspectives on the Machine-Organism Analogy provides the reader with some of the latest perspectives on this vast debate, addressing three major topics:1) the development of a ‘mechanistic’ framework in medicine and biology; 2) the methodological issues underlying the use of ‘simulation’ in cognitive science; 3) the interaction between humans and machines according to 20th-century epistemology. (shrink)

This paper offers an introduction to poststructuralist interpretivist research in information systems, through a poststructuralist theoretical reading of the phenomenon and experience of social networking websites, such as Facebook. This is undertaken through an exploration of how loyally a social networking profile can represent the essence of an individual, and whether Platonic notions of essence, and loyalty of copy, are disturbed by the nature of a social networking profile, in ways described by poststructuralist thinker Deleuze’s notions of the reversal of (...) Platonism. In bringing a poststructuralist critique to such hugely successful and popular social information systems, the paper attempts to further open up the black box of the computer ‘user’, extend interpretive approaches to information systems research to embrace poststructuralism, and explore how notions of the Self might be reflected through engagement with information system (IS), and how an IS appreciation of the phenomenon of global social networking may benefit from embracing such a poststructuralist approach. (shrink)

This article summarizes the recommendations concerning robotics as issued by the Commission for the Ethics of Research in Information Sciences and Technologies (CERNA), the French advisory commission for the ethics of information and communication technology (ICT) research. Robotics has numerous applications in which its role can be overwhelming and may lead to unexpected consequences. In this rapidly evolving technological environment, CERNA does not set novel ethical standards but seeks to make ethical deliberation inseparable from scientific activity. Additionally, it provides tools (...) and guidance for researchers and research institutions. (shrink)

In information societies, operations, decisions and choices previously left to humans are increasingly delegated to algorithms, which may advise, if not decide, about how data should be interpreted and what actions should be taken as a result. More and more often, algorithms mediate social processes, business transactions, governmental decisions, and how we perceive, understand, and interact among ourselves and with the environment. Gaps between the design and operation of algorithms and our understanding of their ethical implications can have severe consequences (...) affecting individuals as well as groups and whole societies. This paper makes three contributions to clarify the ethical importance of algorithmic mediation. It provides a prescriptive map to organise the debate. It reviews the current discussion of ethical aspects of algorithms. And it assesses the available literature in order to identify areas requiring further work to develop the ethics of algorithms. (shrink)

This article aims to draw a portrait of the influence of cybernetics on soft science. To this end, structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy will be successively analyzed in a perspective based on importing concepts stemming from the cybernetic paradigm (information, feedback, entropy, complexity, etc.). By focusing more specifically on the American postwar context, we intend to remind the audience that many soft science specialists were involved in the elaboration of this ‘new science’. We will then retrace the influence of the (...) cybernetic paradigm on structuralism. Starting with the historic meeting between Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, we will illustrate that structural phonology is directly inspired by discoveries stemming from the informational model. In the same perspective, the conceptual borrowings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan from cybernetics will be identified and analyzed. Then, we will address the matter of the relationship between postmodern theories and the cybernetic paradigm. The philosophical movement towards deconstruction, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, will be analyzed based on how they relate to this paradigm. We will also insist on the fact that the philosophy of Jean- François Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne is fully in line with the epistemological revolution launched by cybernetics. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper focuses on the opening of a discursive space: the emergence of informational and scriptural representations of life and their self-negating consequences for the construction of biological meaning. It probes the notion of writing and the book of life and shows how molecular biology's claims to a status of language and texuality undermines its own objective of control. These textual significations were historically contingent. The informational representations of heredity and life were not an outcome of the internal cognitive (...) momentum of molecular biology; they were not a logical necessity of the unravelling of the base-pairing of the DNA double-helix. They were transported into molecular biology still within the protein paradigm of the gene in the 1940s and permeated nearly every discipline in the life and social sciences. These information-based models, metaphors, linguistic, and semiotic tools which were central to the formulation of the genetic code were transported into molecular biology from cybernetics, information theory, electronic computing, and control and communication systems — technosciences that were deeply embedded with the military experiences of world war II and the Cold War. The information discourse thus became fixed in molecular biology not because it worked in the narrow epistemic sense (it did not), but because it positioned molecular biology within postwar discourse and culture, perhaps within the transition to a post-modern information-based society. (shrink)

En los últimos años la «Ética de la Información» ha llegado a tener sentidos distintos para los distintos investigadores que trabajan en una amplia variedad de disciplinas. Esta situación es lamentable, ya que ha producido cierta confusión sobre la naturaleza específica y el alcance de la EI. En el presente artículo se defiende una Ética de la Información que sostiene que el comportamiento y el estatus de los objetos informacionales qua objetos informacionales puede tener un significado moral que vaya más (...) allá de la función instrumental que les atribuyen otras perspectivas éticas y que, por lo tanto, mantiene que pueden contribuir a determinar de manera normativa los deberes éticos y los derechos legalmente exigibles. (shrink)

In recent years, “Information Ethics” (IE) has come to mean different things to different researchers working in a variety of disciplines, including computer ethics, business ethics, medical ethics, computer science, the philosophy of information, social epistemology and library and information science. Using an ontocentric approach, this paper seeks to define the parameters of IE and thereby increase our understanding of the moral challenges associated with Information Communication Technologies.

This essay examines whether and to what extent the “other” in communicative interactions may be otherwise than another human subject and the moral opportunities and challenges this alteration would make available to us. Toward this end, the analysis proceeds in five steps or movements. The first reviews the way the discipline of communication has typically perceived and theorized the role and function of technology. The second and third parts investigate the critical challenges that emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence applications (...) and robots, poses to this standard instrumentalist way of thinking. The fourth part introduces an alternative called “relational ethics,” which effectively flips the script on the usual way of proceeding. And the fifth part presents and responds to one important and notable objection to this alternative. The goal in all of this is not to complicate things but to introduce and formulate a techno-ethics that is more agile in its response to the opportunities and challenges of the 21st century and beyond. (shrink)

This article addresses some crucial assumptions that are rarely acknowledged when organisms and machines are compared. We begin by presenting a short historical reconstruction of the concept of “machine.” We show that there has never been a unique and widely accepted definition of “machine” and that the extant definitions are based on specific technologies. Then we argue that, despite the concept's ambiguity, we can still defend a more robust, specific, and useful notion of machine analogy that accounts for successful strategies (...) in connecting specific devices (or mechanisms) with particular living phenomena. For that purpose, we distinguish between what we call “generic identity” and proper “machine analogy.” We suggest that “generic identity”—which, roughly stated, presumes that some sort of vague similarity might exist between organisms and machines—is a source of the confusion haunting many persistent disagreements and that, accordingly, it should be dismissed. Instead, we endorse a particular form of “machine analogy” where the relation between organic phenomena and mechanical devices is not generic but specific and grounded on the identification of shared “invariants.” We propose that the machine analogy is a kind of analogy as proportion and we elucidate how this is used or might be used in scientific practices. We finally argue that while organisms are not machines in a generic sense, they might share many robust “invariants,” which justify the scientists' use of machine analogies for grasping living phenomena. (shrink)

I address the problem of caring for our body-mind through neuropragmatism, cybernetics, and Larry Hickman’s work on John Dewey and the philosophy of technology. The problems of body-mind health are related to Emma Dowling’s The Care Crisis. I address this crisis by drawing on Jay Schulkin’s conception of viability as the creative tension between stability and precarity. From this, I extend body-mind health to questions of democracy, leading to the proposal of body-mind-world as an elaboration of neuropragmatism’s evolutionary and ecological (...) conception of experience as Œ and Hickman’s distinction between the merely valued nature-as-nature and the valuable nature-as-culture. I conclude with a reimagination of creative democracy as a moral ideal for dealing with the care crisis. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler’s theoretical and practical Internation Project called for a refoundation of theoretical computer science that would also put the fact of exchange back at the centre of the conceptualization and organization of the economy. This can be interpreted as a call to critique a form of capitalism that has arisen over the past 70 years through an ideology via which ‘information’ conjoins computation and economics into what becomes an absolute market. But another history of exchange unfolds contemporaneously with this (...) ideology: that pursued in responses to Marcel Mauss’s anthropology of the gift, by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Bataille and Maurice Godelier, among others. Stiegler’s ‘neganthropology’ equally responds to and is informed by this other history of the fact of exchange but, by looking at these works more closely, it may be possible to pursue Stiegler’s project in fields such as kinship and sexuality, which were not his direct concern. (shrink)

The need for fair and just AI is often related to the possibility of understanding AI itself, in other words, of turning an opaque box into a glass box, as inspectable as possible. Transparency and explainability, however, pertain to the technical domain and to philosophy of science, thus leaving the ethics and epistemology of AI largely disconnected. To remedy this, we propose an integrated approach premised on the idea that a glass-box epistemology should explicitly consider how to incorporate values and (...) other normative considerations, such as intersectoral vulnerabilities, at critical stages of the whole process from design and implementation to use and assessment. To connect ethics and epistemology of AI, we perform a double shift of focus. First, we move from trusting the output of an AI system to trusting the process that leads to the outcome. Second, we move from expert assessment to more inclusive assessment strategies, aiming to facilitate expert and non-expert assessment. Together, these two moves yield a framework usable for experts and non-experts when they inquire into relevant epistemological and ethical aspects of AI systems. We dub our framework ‘epistemology-cum-ethics’ to signal the equal importance of both aspects. We develop it from the vantage point of the designers: how to create the conditions to internalize values into the whole process of design, implementation, use, and assessment of an AI system, in which values (epistemic and non-epistemic) are explicitly considered at each stage and inspectable by every salient actor involved at any moment. (shrink)

The present paper uses a Flourishing Ethics analysis to address the question of which ethical values and principles should be “instilled” into artificially intelligent agents. This is an urgent question that is still being asked seven decades after philosopher/scientist Norbert Wiener first asked it. An answer is developed by assuming that human flourishing is the central ethical value, which other ethical values, and related principles, can be used to defend and advance. The upshot is that Flourishing Ethics can provide a (...) common underlying ethical foundation for a wide diversity of cultures and communities around the globe; and the members of each specific culture or community can add their own specific cultural values—ones which they treasure, and which help them to make sense of their moral lives. (shrink)

This article examines central tensions in cybernetics, defined as the study of self-organization, communication, automated feedback in organisms, and other distributed informational networks, from its wartime beginnings to its contemporary adaptations. By examining aspects of both first- and second-order cybernetics, the article introduces an epistemological standpoint that highlights the tension between its definition as a theory of recursion and a theory of control, prediction, and actionability. I begin by examining the historical outcomes of the Macy Conferences to provide a context (...) for cybernetics’ initial development for scientific epistemology, ethics, and socio-political thought. I draw extensively from Norbert Wiener, Heinz von Foerster, Ross Ashby, and Gregory Bateson, key figures of this movement. I then elaborate upon certain premises of cybernetics to further elucidate an intellectual history from which to begin to construct a cybernetic epistemology. I conclude by offering the second-order cybernetic concept of recursivity as a model and method for ethico-epistemological questioning that can account for both the constructive potential and the limitations of cybernetics in science and society. (shrink)

Norbert Wiener’s idea of “cybernetics” is linked to temporality as in a physical as in a philosophical sense. “Time orders” can be the slogan of that natural cybernetics of time: time orders by itself in its “screen” in virtue of being a well-ordering valid until the present moment and dividing any totality into two parts: the well-ordered of the past and the yet unordered of the future therefore sharing the common boundary of the present between them when the ordering is (...) taking place by choices. Thus, the quantity of information defined by units of choices, whether bits or qubits, describes that process of ordering happening in the present moment. The totality (which can be considered also as a particular or “regional” totality) turns out to be divided into two parts: the internality of the past and the externality of the future by the course of time, but identifiable to each other in virtue of scientific transcendentalism (e.g. mathematical, physical, and historical transcendentalism). A properly mathematical approach to the “totality and time” is introduced by the abstract concept of “evolutionary tree” (i.e. regardless of the specific nature of that to which refers: such as biological evolution, Feynman trajectories, social and historical development, etc.), Then, the other half of the future can be represented as a deformed mirror image of the evolutionary tree taken place already in the past: therefore the past and future part are seen to be unifiable as a mirrorly doubled evolutionary tree and thus representable as generalized Feynman trajectories. The formalism of the separable complex Hilbert space (respectively, the qubit Hilbert space) applied and further elaborated in quantum mechanics in order to uniform temporal and reversible, discrete and continuous processes is relevant. Then, the past and future parts of evolutionary tree would constitute a wave function (or even only a single qubit once the concept of actual infinity be involved to real processes). Each of both parts of it, i.e. either the future evolutionary tree or its deformed mirror image, would represented a “half of the whole”. The two halves can be considered as the two disjunctive states of any bit as two fundamentally inseparable (in virtue of quantum correlation) “halves” of any qubit. A few important corollaries exemplify that natural cybernetics of time. (shrink)

The concept of information can be viewed from two perspectives, namely epistemic and ontological. In the epistemic view, information is associated with meaning, semantics, and knowledge, while in the ontological view, it is understood as structures and forms of objects. Information is most often perceived as epistemic information, yet a closer look at epistemic information reveals that this concept does not account for ontological information. This paper poses the following question: Should we select epistemic or ontological information as our primary (...) concept of information, or should we acknowledge that both kinds of information are required for a full comprehension? The discussion here is supported by references to modern research in physics, computing, cosmology, and information sciences. (shrink)

This article examines the history of cybernetics in France, and the history of French cybernetics in the context of the emergent field of the history of cybernetics. Drawing upon an unfamiliar group of intellectuals and sources, I discuss the way in which French cybernetics was not primarily the hyper-philosophical strain we have come to associate with names such as Derrida and Lévi-Strauss, but an approach to thinking through political and social problems that some on the left would even deign to (...) call pragmatic. In particular, I follow a group of intellectuals known as the Groupe des dix, who, in the aftermath of the tumult of May ‘68, formed an interdisciplinary think tank to try to work out how to bridge the gap between science and society. In order to facilitate conversations between politicians, philosophers, biologists, and sociologists (to name just a few of the represented disciplines), the Groupe reached for a language that was supposed to be truly omnidisciplinary: that of cybernetics. And they did so in a country where cybernetics was not properly represented as a laboratory science. On this last point, this paper makes an addition to the history of cybernetics by offering a portrait not of cybernetics in action, but of cybernetics in vulgarization. Not that the Groupe would not make their own stamp on politics: Several of them still hold significant power in adjudicating the role of science and technology in the public sphere in the French state. (shrink)

The concept of information has been extensively studied and written about, yet no consensus on a unified definition of information has to date been reached. This paper seeks to establish the basis for a unified definition of information. We claim a biosemiotics perspective, based on Gregory Bateson’s definition of information, provides a footing on which to build because the frame this provides has applicability to both the sciences and humanities. A key issue in reaching a unified definition of information is (...) the fundamental problem of identifying how a human organism, in a self-referential process, develops from a state in which its knowledge of the human-organism-in-its-environment is almost non-existent to a state in which the human organism not only recognizes the existence of the environment but also sees itself as part of the human-organism-in-its-environment system. This allows a human organism not only to self-referentially engage with the environment and navigate through it, but also to transform it in its own image and likeness. In other words, the Fundamental Problem of the Science of Information concerns the phylogenetic development process, as well as the ontogenetic development process of Homo sapiens sapiens from a single cell to our current multicellular selves, all in a changing long-term and short-term environment, respectively. (shrink)

This two-part article presents the research program for a theory and empirical analysis of religious evolution. It is assumed that religion isprimarilya co-evolution to societal evolution, which in turn is a co-evolution to mental, organic, and physical evolution. The theory of evolution is triangulated with the systems theory and the semiotically informed theory of communication, so that knowledge can be gained that would not be acquired by only one of the three theories: The differentiation between religion and its environment can (...) be reconstructed based on the theory of evolution. The elements of the theory of evolution can be understood as the formation of systems. The semiotically informed theory of communication clarifies the conditions of the combination of both the systems theory and the theory of evolution as well as its objects. In turn, the combination of the systems theory and the theory of evolution can describe how communication—including religion and science—evolves and is structured. (shrink)

The potential societal impacts of automation using intelligent control and communications technologies have emerged as topics in a number of recent writings and public policy initiatives. Many of these expressions have referenced the writings and research efforts of Herbert Simon (1961), Norbert Wiener (1948), and contemporaries from their early technological and social vantage points concerning the future of technology and society. Constructed entities labeled as “thinking machines” (such as IBM’s Watson as well as intelligent chatbot and robotic systems) have also (...) played significant roles in this discourse. This paper provides an historical sequencing then analyzes a selection of writings produced since the 1940s concerning the economic and social issues involving artificial intelligence (AI) research and applications. The paper explores how overstatements and hyperbolic themes and concepts, often stemming from AI’s early periods, are being employed in characterizations of current AI approaches in apparently opportunistic attempts to provide rhetorical support for various large-scale business and societal initiatives. It also addresses the relative neglect of the consideration of many of AI’s sociotechnical failures and discontinued approaches in recent examinations of automation and social welfare issues. The paper discusses the moral logic of AI researchers and developers providing reasonable and measured narratives in public discourse rather than hyperbole, efforts that can empower decision makers to make sounder judgments concerning the technology’s current and future applications as well as allocate the rewards of the technology more equitably. (shrink)

The task of this essay is to respond to the question concerning robots and responsibility—to answer for the way that we understand, debate, and decide who or what is able to answer for decisions and actions undertaken by increasingly interactive, autonomous, and sociable mechanisms. The analysis proceeds through three steps or movements. It begins by critically examining the instrumental theory of technology, which determines the way one typically deals with and responds to the question of responsibility when it involves technology. (...) It then considers three instances where recent innovations in robotics challenge this standard operating procedure by opening gaps in the usual way of assigning responsibility. The innovations considered in this section include: autonomous technology, machine learning, and social robots. The essay concludes by evaluating the three different responses—instrumentalism 2.0, machine ethics, and hybrid responsibility—that have been made in face of these difficulties in an effort to map out the opportunities and challenges of and for responsible robotics. (shrink)

The mental realm seems different to the physical realm; the mental is thought to be dependent on, yet distinct from the physical. But how, exactly, are the two realms supposed to be different, and what, exactly, creates the seemingly insurmountable juxtaposition between the mental and the physical? This review identifies and discusses five marks of the mental, features that set characteristically mental phenomena apart from the characteristically physical phenomena. These five marks (intentionality, consciousness, free will, teleology, and normativity) are not (...) presented as a set of features that define mentality. Rather, each of them is something we seem to associate with phenomena we consider mental, and each of them seems to be in tension with the physical view of reality in its own particular way. It is thus suggested how there is no single mind-body problem, but a set of distinct but interconnected problems. Each of these separate problems is analyzed, and their differences, similarities and connections are identified. This provides a useful basis for future theoretical work on psychology and philosophy of mind, that until now has too often suffered from unclarities, inadequacies, and conflations. (shrink)

In 2002, Luciano Floridi published a paper called What is the Philosophy of Information?, where he argues for a new paradigm in philosophical research. To what extent should his proposal be accepted? Is the Philosophy of Information actually a new paradigm, in the Kuhninan sense, in Philosophy? Or is it only a new branch of Epistemology? In our discussion we will argue in defense of Floridi’s proposal. We believe that Philosophy of Information has the types of features had by other (...) areas already acknowledge as authentic in Philosophy. By way of an analogical argument we will argue that since Philosophy of Information has its own topics, method and problems it would be counter-intuitive not to accept it as a new philosophical area. To strengthen our position we present and discuss main topics of Philosophy of Information. (shrink)

The emerging transdisciplinary field of consciousness studies merges transpersonal psychology with recent brain studies. In this paper, I argue that this new discipline must come to terms with the rhetorics of control in the history of brain research. I establish parallels between the discourses of lobotomy and psychosurgery, Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB), and cybernetics, using the work of Jose Delgado, Norbert Wiener, and Bernard Wolfe. The rhetoric of social control remains a shadow side of brain research, of the (...) popularization of brain science, and of attempts to apply such research. (shrink)