Will future lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), or ‘killer robots’, be a threat to humanity? The European Parliament has called for a moratorium or ban of LAWS; the ‘Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention at the United Nations’ are presently discussing such a ban, which is supported by the great majority of writers and campaigners on the issue. However, the main arguments in favour of a ban are unsound. LAWS do not support extrajudicial killings, they do not take responsibility away (...) from humans; in fact they increase the abil-ity to hold humans accountable for war crimes. Using LAWS in war would probably reduce human suffering overall. Finally, the availability of LAWS would probably not increase the probability of war or other lethal conflict—especially as compared to extant remote-controlled weapons. The widespread fear of killer robots is unfounded: They are probably good news. (shrink)

Interactions between an intelligent software agent and a human user are ubiquitous in everyday situations such as access to information, entertainment, and purchases. In such interactions, the ISA mediates the user’s access to the content, or controls some other aspect of the user experience, and is not designed to be neutral about outcomes of user choices. Like human users, ISAs are driven by goals, make autonomous decisions, and can learn from experience. Using ideas from bounded rationality, we frame these interactions (...) as instances of an ISA whose reward depends on actions performed by the user. Such agents benefit by steering the user’s behaviour towards outcomes that maximise the ISA’s utility, which may or may not be aligned with that of the user. Video games, news recommendation aggregation engines, and fitness trackers can all be instances of this general case. Our analysis facilitates distinguishing various subcases of interaction, as well as second-order effects that might include the possibility for adaptive interfaces to induce behavioural addiction, and/or change in user belief. We present these types of interaction within a conceptual framework, and review current examples of persuasive technologies and the issues that arise from their use. We argue that the nature of the feedback commonly used by learning agents to update their models and subsequent decisions could steer the behaviour of human users away from what benefits them, and in a direction that can undermine autonomy and cause further disparity between actions and goals as exemplified by addictive and compulsive behaviour. We discuss some of the ethical, social and legal implications of this technology and argue that it can sometimes exploit and reinforce weaknesses in human beings. (shrink)

YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This (...) is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users’ attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers. (shrink)

This paper praises and criticizes Peter-Paul Verbeek's What Things Do . The four things that Verbeek does well are: remind us of the importance of technological things; bring Karl Jaspers into the conversation on technology; explain how technology "co-shapes" experience by reading Bruno Latour's actor-network theory in light of Don Ihde's post-phenomenology; develop a material aesthetics of design. The three things that Verbeek does not do well are: analyze the material conditions in which things are produced; criticize the social-political design (...) and use context of things; and appreciate how liberal moral-political theory contributes to our evaluation of technology. (shrink)

The United States Army’s Future Combat Systems Project, which aims to manufacture a “robot army” to be ready for deployment by 2012, is only the latest and most dramatic example of military interest in the use of artificially intelligent systems in modern warfare. This paper considers the ethics of a decision to send artificially intelligent robots into war, by asking who we should hold responsible when an autonomous weapon system is involved in an atrocity of the sort that would normally (...) be described as a war crime. A number of possible loci of responsibility for robot war crimes are canvassed; the persons who designed or programmed the system, the commanding officer who ordered its use, the machine itself. I argue that in fact none of these are ultimately satisfactory. Yet it is a necessary condition for fighting a just war, under the principle of jus in bellum, that someone can be justly held responsible for deaths that occur in the course of the war. As this condition cannot be met in relation to deaths caused by an autonomous weapon system it would therefore be unethical to deploy such systems in warfare. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the hypothesis that, ‘moral agency is distributed over both humans and technological artefacts’, recently proposed by Peter-Paul Verbeek. We present some arguments for thinking that Verbeek is mistaken. We argue that artefacts such as bridges, word processors, or bombs can never be (part of) moral agents. After having discussed some possible responses, as well as a moderate view proposed by Illies and Meijers, we conclude that technological artefacts are neutral tools that are at most bearers (...) of instrumental value. (shrink)

According to some philosophers of technology, technology embodies moral values in virtue of its functional properties and the intentions of its designers. But this paper shows that such an account makes the values supposedly embedded in technology epistemically opaque and that it does not allow for values to change. Therefore, to overcome these shortcomings, the paper introduces the novel Affordance Account of Value Embedding as a superior alternative. Accordingly, artefacts bear affordances, that is, artefacts make certain actions likelier given the (...) circumstances. Based on an interdisciplinary perspective that invokes recent moral anthropology, I conceptualize affordances as response-dependent properties. That is, they depend on intrinsic as well as extrinsic properties of the artefact. We have reason to value these properties. Therefore, artefacts embody values and are not value-neutral, which has practical implications for the design of new technologies. (shrink)

This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

The idea of artificial intelligence for social good is gaining traction within information societies in general and the AI community in particular. It has the potential to tackle social problems through the development of AI-based solutions. Yet, to date, there is only limited understanding of what makes AI socially good in theory, what counts as AI4SG in practice, and how to reproduce its initial successes in terms of policies. This article addresses this gap by identifying seven ethical factors that are (...) essential for future AI4SG initiatives. The analysis is supported by 27 case examples of AI4SG projects. Some of these factors are almost entirely novel to AI, while the significance of other factors is heightened by the use of AI. From each of these factors, corresponding best practices are formulated which, subject to context and balance, may serve as preliminary guidelines to ensure that well-designed AI is more likely to serve the social good. (shrink)

Affordances are possibilities for action offered by the environment. Recent research on affordances holds that there are differences in how people experience such possibilities for action. However, these differences have not been properly investigated. In this paper I start by briefly scrutinizing the existing literature on this issue, and then argue for two claims. First, that whether an affordance solicits action or not depends on its relevance to the agent’s concerns. Second, that the experiential character of how an affordance solicits (...) action depends on the character of the concern to which it is relevant. Concerns are conceived of as bodily forms of responsiveness, and solicitations are experienced through this responsiveness. The main aim of this paper is to make clear that an understanding of experiential differences in solicitations has to be based on a phenomenological appreciation of how one experiences one’s responsiveness to those solicitations. In the remainder of the paper I show how such a phenomenological appreciation reveals several characteristics of our responsiveness and I briefly explore three of them: valence, force and mineness. In the final section I discuss the self-referentiality of affordances in light of the current proposal, and argue that this self-referentiality is broader than is typically acknowledged. (shrink)

It has been argued that affordances are not meaningful and are thus not useful to be applied in contexts where specifically meaningfulness of experience is at stake (e.g. clinical contexts or discussions of autonomous agency). This paper aims to reconceptualize affordances such as to make them relevant and applicable in such contexts. It starts by investigating the ‘ambiguity’ of (possibilities for) action. In both philosophy of action and affordance research, this ambiguity is typically resolved by adhering to the agents intentions (...) and concerns. I discuss some recent accounts of affordances that highlight these concerns but argue that they tend to adopt an ‘atomistic’ approach where there is no acknowledgement of how these concerns are embedded in the agents wider concerns, values, projects and commitments. An holistic approach that does acknowledge this can be found in psychological research on agents having a sense of what they’re doing. I will discuss this research in the second part of the paper and argue that agents can analogously have a sense of what is afforded. This is deemed the entry point for understanding the meaningfulness of affordances. In the final part of the paper I apply this analysis to recent attempts which seek to make sense of authentic and autonomous agency in terms of affordances. (shrink)

Information technology is an integral part of the practices and institutions of post-industrial society. It is also a source of hard moral questions and thus is both a probing and relevant area for moral theory. In this volume, an international team of philosophers sheds light on many of the ethical issues arising from information technology, including informational privacy, digital divide and equal access, e-trust and tele-democracy. Collectively, these essays demonstrate how accounts of equality and justice, property and privacy benefit from (...) taking into account how information technology has shaped our social and epistemic practices and our moral experiences. Information technology changes the way that we look at the world and deal with one another. It calls, therefore, for a re-examination of notions such as friendship, care, commitment and trust. (shrink)

Bruno Latour was once asked : "Do you believe in reality?" This text is an attempt to answer this question.

Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence, the authors argue (...) that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality, in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show, the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun. -/- Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents, probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an exposition and critique of Johnson and Noorman’s (2014) three conceptualizations of the agential roles artificial systems can play. I argue that two of these conceptions are unproblematic: that of causally efficacious agency and “acting for” or surrogate agency. Their third conception, that of “autonomous agency,” however, is one I have reservations about. The authors point out that there are two ways in which the term “autonomy” can be used: there is, firstly, the engineering sense (...) of the term, which simply refers to the ability of some system to act independently of substantive human control. Secondly, there is the moral sense of the term, which has traditionally grounded many notions of human mor-al responsibility. I argue that the continued usage of “autonomy” in discussions of artificial agency complicates matters unnecessarily. This occurs in two ways: firstly, the condition of autonomy, even in its engineering sense, fails to accurately describe the way “autonomous” systems are developed in practice. Secondly, the continued usage of autonomy in the moral sense introduces unnecessary meta-physical baggage form the free will debate into discussions about moral agency. In order to understand the debate surrounding autonomy, we would therefore first need to settle many seemingly intractable metaphysical questions regarding the existence of free will in human beings. (shrink)

This paper praises and criticizes Peter-Paul Verbeek's What Things Do. The four things that Verbeek does well are: remind us of the importance of technological things; bring Karl Jaspers into the conversation on technology; explain how technology "co-shapes" experience by reading Bruno Latour's actor-network theory in light of Don Ihde's post-phenomenology; develop a material aesthetics of design. The three things that Verbeek does not do well are: analyze the material conditions in which things are produced; criticize the social-political design and (...) use context of things; and appreciate how liberal moral-political theory contributes to our evaluation of technology. (shrink)

In so far as long-range tele-operated weapons, such as the United States’ Predator and Reaper drones, allow their operators to fight wars in what appears to be complete safety, thousands of kilometres removed from those whom they target and kill, it is unclear whether drone operators either require courage or have the opportunity to develop or exercise it. This chapter investigates the implications of the development of tele-operated warfare for the extent to which courage will remain central to the role (...) of the warrior and for the future culture of the armed services in the age of drone warfare. (shrink)

This article argues that an ethical framework will help to harness the potential of AI while keeping humans in control.