25 found
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  1. Should the use of adaptive machine learning systems in medicine be classified as research?Robert Sparrow, Joshua Hatherley, Justin Oakley & Chris Bain - 2024 - American Journal of Bioethics 24 (10):58-69.
    A novel advantage of the use of machine learning (ML) systems in medicine is their potential to continue learning from new data after implementation in clinical practice. To date, considerations of the ethical questions raised by the design and use of adaptive machine learning systems in medicine have, for the most part, been confined to discussion of the so-called “update problem,” which concerns how regulators should approach systems whose performance and parameters continue to change even after they have received regulatory (...)
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  2. Why machines cannot be moral.Robert Sparrow - 2021 - AI and Society (3):685-693.
    The fact that real-world decisions made by artificial intelligences (AI) are often ethically loaded has led a number of authorities to advocate the development of “moral machines”. I argue that the project of building “ethics” “into” machines presupposes a flawed understanding of the nature of ethics. Drawing on the work of the Australian philosopher, Raimond Gaita, I argue that ethical dilemmas are problems for particular people and not (just) problems for everyone who faces a similar situation. Moreover, the force of (...)
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  3. Egalitarianism and Moral Bioenhancement.Robert Sparrow - 2014 - American Journal of Bioethics 14 (4):20-28.
    A number of philosophers working in applied ethics and bioethics are now earnestly debating the ethics of what they term “moral bioenhancement.” I argue that the society-wide program of biological manipulations required to achieve the purported goals of moral bioenhancement would necessarily implicate the state in a controversial moral perfectionism. Moreover, the prospect of being able to reliably identify some people as, by biological constitution, significantly and consistently more moral than others would seem to pose a profound challenge to egalitarian (...)
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  4. The virtues of interpretable medical AI.Joshua Hatherley, Robert Sparrow & Mark Howard - 2024 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 33 (3):323-332.
    Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have demonstrated impressive performance across a variety of clinical tasks. However, notoriously, sometimes these systems are 'black boxes'. The initial response in the literature was a demand for 'explainable AI'. However, recently, several authors have suggested that making AI more explainable or 'interpretable' is likely to be at the cost of the accuracy of these systems and that prioritising interpretability in medical AI may constitute a 'lethal prejudice'. In this paper, we defend the value of interpretability (...)
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  5. Technology ethics assessment: Politicising the ‘Socratic approach’.Robert Sparrow - 2023 - Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility (2):454-466.
    That technologies may raise ethical issues is now widely recognised. The ‘responsible innovation’ literature – as well as, to a lesser extent, the applied ethics and bioethics literature – has responded to the need for ethical reflection on technologies by developing a number of tools and approaches to facilitate such reflection. Some of these instruments consist of lists of questions that people are encouraged to ask about technologies – a methodology known as the ‘Socratic approach’. However, to date, these instruments (...)
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  6. Diachronic and synchronic variation in the performance of adaptive machine learning systems: the ethical challenges.Joshua Hatherley & Robert Sparrow - 2023 - Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 30 (2):361-366.
    Objectives: Machine learning (ML) has the potential to facilitate “continual learning” in medicine, in which an ML system continues to evolve in response to exposure to new data over time, even after being deployed in a clinical setting. In this article, we provide a tutorial on the range of ethical issues raised by the use of such “adaptive” ML systems in medicine that have, thus far, been neglected in the literature. -/- Target audience: The target audiences for this tutorial are (...)
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  7. (1 other version)Procreative Beneficence, Obligation, and Eugenics.Robert Sparrow - 2007 - Genomics, Society and Policy 3 (3):43-59.
    The argument of Julian Savulescu’s 2001 paper, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children” is flawed in a number of respects. Savulescu confuses reasons with obligations and equivocates between the claim that parents have some reason to want the best for their children and the more radical claim that they are morally obligated to attempt to produce the best child possible. Savulescu offers a prima facie implausible account of parental obligation, as even the best parents typically fail to (...)
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  8. High hopes for “Deep Medicine”? AI, economics, and the future of care.Robert Sparrow & Joshua Hatherley - 2020 - Hastings Center Report 50 (1):14-17.
    In Deep Medicine, Eric Topol argues that the development of artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare will lead to a dramatic shift in the culture and practice of medicine. Topol claims that, rather than replacing physicians, AI could function alongside of them in order to allow them to devote more of their time to face-to-face patient care. Unfortunately, these high hopes for AI-enhanced medicine fail to appreciate a number of factors that, we believe, suggest a radically different picture for the future (...)
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  9. The promise and perils of AI in medicine.Robert Sparrow & Joshua James Hatherley - 2019 - International Journal of Chinese and Comparative Philosophy of Medicine 17 (2):79-109.
    What does Artificial Intelligence (AI) have to contribute to health care? And what should we be looking out for if we are worried about its risks? In this paper we offer a survey, and initial evaluation, of hopes and fears about the applications of artificial intelligence in medicine. AI clearly has enormous potential as a research tool, in genomics and public health especially, as well as a diagnostic aid. It’s also highly likely to impact on the organisational and business practices (...)
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  10. Can machines be people? Reflections on the Turing triage test.Robert Sparrow - 2011 - In Patrick Lin, Keith Abney & George A. Bekey (eds.), Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics. MIT Press. pp. 301-315.
    In, “The Turing Triage Test”, published in Ethics and Information Technology, I described a hypothetical scenario, modelled on the famous Turing Test for machine intelligence, which might serve as means of testing whether or not machines had achieved the moral standing of people. In this paper, I: (1) explain why the Turing Triage Test is of vital interest in the context of contemporary debates about the ethics of AI; (2) address some issues that complexify the application of this test; and, (...)
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  11. Predators or Ploughshares? Arms Control of Robotic Weapons.Robert Sparrow - 2009 - IEEE Technology and Society 28 (1):25-29.
    This paper makes the case for arms control regimes to govern the development and deployment of autonomous weapon systems and long range uninhabited aerial vehicles.
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  12. Implants and Ethnocide: learning from the Cochlear implant controversy.Robert Sparrow - 2010 - Disability and Society 25 (4):455-466.
    This paper uses the fictional case of the ‘Babel fish’ to explore and illustrate the issues involved in the controversy about the use of cochlear implants in prelinguistically deaf children. Analysis of this controversy suggests that the development of genetic tests for deafness poses a serious threat to the continued flourishing of Deaf culture. I argue that the relationships between Deaf and hearing cultures that are revealed and constructed in debates about genetic testing are themselves deserving of ethical evaluation. Making (...)
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  13. Drones, courage, and military culture.Robert Sparrow - 2015 - In Jr Lucas (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics. London: Routledge. pp. 380-394.
    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 (...)
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  14. The virtues of interpretable medical AI.Joshua Hatherley, Robert Sparrow & Mark Howard - 2024 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 33 (3).
    Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have demonstrated impressive performance across a variety of clinical tasks. However, notoriously, sometimes these systems are “black boxes.” The initial response in the literature was a demand for “explainable AI.” However, recently, several authors have suggested that making AI more explainable or “interpretable” is likely to be at the cost of the accuracy of these systems and that prioritizing interpretability in medical AI may constitute a “lethal prejudice.” In this paper, we defend the value of interpretability (...)
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  15. Genes, identity, and the expressivist critique.Robert Sparrow - 2008 - In Loane Skene and Janna Thompson (ed.), The Sorting Society. Cambridge University Press. pp. 111-132..
    In this paper, I explore the “expressivist critique” of the use of prenatal testing to select against the birth of persons with impairments. I begin by setting out the expressivist critique and then highlighting, through an investigation of an influential objection to this critique, the ways in which both critics and proponents of the use of technologies of genetic selection negotiate a difficult set of dilemmas surrounding the relationship between genes and identity. I suggest that we may be able to (...)
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  16. Twenty seconds to comply: Autonomous weapon systems and the recognition of surrender.Robert Sparrow - 2015 - International Law Studies 91:699-728.
    Would it be ethical to deploy autonomous weapon systems (AWS) if they were unable to reliably recognize when enemy forces had surrendered? I suggest that an inability to reliably recognize surrender would not prohibit the ethical deployment of AWS where there was a limited window of opportunity for targets to surrender between the launch of the AWS and its impact. However, the operations of AWS with a high degree of autonomy and/or long periods of time between release and impact are (...)
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  17. (Im)Moral technology? Thought experiments and the future of `mind control'.Robert Sparrow - 2014 - In Akira Akabayashi (ed.), The Future of Bioethics: International Dialogues. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 113-119.
    In their paper, “Autonomy and the ethics of biological behaviour modification”, Savulescu, Douglas, and Persson discuss the ethics of a technology for improving moral motivation and behaviour that does not yet exist and will most likely never exist. At the heart of their argument sits the imagined case of a “moral technology” that magically prevents people from developing intentions to commit seriously immoral actions. It is not too much of a stretch, then, to characterise their paper as a thought experiment (...)
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  18. War without virtue?Robert Sparrow - 2013 - In Bradley Jay Strawser (ed.), Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military. New York, US: Oup Usa. pp. 84-105.
    A number of recent and influential accounts of military ethics have argued that there exists a distinctive “role morality” for members of the armed services—a “warrior code.” A “good warrior” is a person who cultivates and exercises the “martial” or “warrior” virtues. By transforming combat into a “desk job” that can be conducted from the safety of the home territory of advanced industrial powers without need for physical strength or martial valour, long-range robotic weapons, such as the “Predator” and “Reaper” (...)
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  19. Talkin' 'bout a (nanotechnological) revolution.Robert Sparrow - 2008 - IEEE Technology and Society 27 (2):37-43.
    It is often claimed that the development of nanotechnology will constitute a “technological revolution” with profound social, economic, and political consequences. The full implications of this claim can best be understood by imagining a scenario in which a political revolutionary made all the same claims that are commonly made by enthusiasts for nanotechnology. I argue that most people would be outraged to learn that the members of an unelected group were planning to radically reshape society in this fashion. I survey (...)
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  20. Talking Sense about Political Correctness.Robert Sparrow - 2002 - Journal of Australian Studies 73:119-133.
    In this paper I make a number of points about “political correctness”. Although individually these arguments seem straightforward - and will hopefully be uncontroversial - put together in context they reveal the idea of a “politically correct”, left-wing dominated, media or intelligentsia in Western political culture to be a conservative bogeyman. The rhetoric of “political correctness” is in fact overwhelmingly a right-wing conservative one which itself is used mainly to silence dissenting political viewpoints. However, the same investigation also suggests that (...)
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  21. Better off Deaf.Robert Sparrow - 2002 - Res Publica (Misc) 11 (1): 11-16.
    Should parents try to give their children the best lives possible? Yes. Do parents have an obligation to give their children the widest possible set of opportunities in the future? No. Understanding how both of these things can be true will allow us to go a long way towards understanding why a Deaf couple might wish their child to be born Deaf and why we might have reason to respect this desire.
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  22. Nanotechnologically Enhanced Combat Systems: The Downside of Invulnerability.Robert Mark Simpson & Robert Sparrow - 2014 - In Bert Gordijn & Anthony Mark Cutter (eds.), In Pursuit of Nanoethics. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 89-103.
    In this paper we examine the ethical implications of emerging Nanotechnologically Enhanced Combat Systems (or 'NECS'). Through a combination of materials innovation and biotechnology, NECS are aimed at making combatants much less vulnerable to munitions that pose a lethal threat to soldiers protected by conventional armor. We argue that increasing technological disparities between forces armed with NECS and those without will exacerbate the ethical problems of asymmetric warfare. This will place pressure on the just war principles of jus in bello, (...)
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  23. The real force of 'procreative beneficence'.Robert Sparrow - 2014 - In Akira Akabayashi (ed.), The Future of Bioethics: International Dialogues. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 183-192.
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  24. 'Trust us... we're doctors': Science, media, and ethics in the Hwang stem cell controversy.Robert Sparrow - 2006 - Journal of Communication Research 43 (1):5-24.
    When doubts were first raised about the veracity of the dramatic advances in stem cell research announced by Professor Hwang Woo-Suk, a significant minority response was to question the qualifications of journalists to investigate the matter. In this paper I examine the contemporary relationships between science, scientists, the public, and the media. In the modern context the progress of science often relies on the media to mobilise public support for research and also for the purpose of communication within the scientific (...)
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  25. Terraforming, vandalism and virtue ethics.Robert Sparrow - 2015 - In Jai Galliott (ed.), Commercial Space Exploration: Ethics, Policy and Governance. Ashgate. pp. 161-178.
    ‘Terraforming’ is hypothetical climatic and geo-physical engineering of other planets on a grand scale, with the aim of turning the so-called ‘barren’ planets in our (or for that matter another) solar system into habitable earth-like eco-systems. Although terraforming sounds like an idea from science fiction (where it indeed has appeared), it has been seriously proposed as a future project for the human race. With such a technology we could colonise the solar system and perhaps eventually others, moulding them in an (...)
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