In the realm of man's culture, among the things created by man, art should be beautiful; its primary essential characteristic should be that it be able to evoke a sense of beauty in the person, that by its beauty it be able to provide for the person the pleasure of the sense of beauty. This is a fact that no one can deny outright. However, saying that art should be beautiful is not the same as saying that all art is (...) beautiful. In fact, there is art which is beautiful and art which is not beautiful; and this too is a fact that no one can deny. (shrink)

Selections from the sayings of Zhuangzi rendered into cartoon form and translated into English.

Ai Ssu-ch'i is a little known but very important figure in the introduction of Marxism-Leninism into China. This first article provides a brief biography of Ai Ssu-ch'i as well as a detailed account of his activities as teacher, author and propagandist. Among his other services to the cause of Marxism-Leninism in China, one has to stress Ai Ssu-ch'i's systematic opposition to Yeh Ch'ing and to the non-Communist interpretation of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People. (cf.SST 10 (1970), 138–166.).

In the broadest sense, this intellectual biography is designed to give insight into the reasons why Western values and institutions failed to take root in the Chinese environment. Three interrelated themes are treated by Professor Duiker: the evolution of the Chinese educational system from the beginning of the 20th century to World War II; the process by which a Chinese intellectual absorbed Western values and attitudes while retaining significant elements of his traditional Confucian world view; the goals of the humanist (...) movement in early republican China and the reasons for its failure. Ts'ai, as first Minister of Education under the 1912 republic, helped to formulate educational policies during an important stage of transition in modern China. Later, as chancellor of Peking University, he was a central figure in the tumultuous events of the May Fourth period. Having been educated traditionally to the doctoral level before studying at a European university, Ts'ai attempted to synthesize the humanist side of the Confucian tradition with the libertarian elements in Western culture. Ts'ai's synthesis was unique but ultimately unsuccessful. Penn State Study No. 41. (shrink)

In Ai Ssu-ch'i is exemplified and substantiated the Soviet influence on the official definition of philosophy in the history of Communist Party of China, i.e., the assertion about and the method for knowledge of the world. Such a philosophical knowledge has as its formal object the most fundamental laws of the universe.In order to acquire such a genuine philosophical knowledge, one needs a desire to change the world and a proletarian point of view. For only by aiming at changing the (...) world is inevitability reflected; only in the proletarian viewpoint are the objective laws reflected. In order to substantiate these assertions, one has to point out that, first, man's thinking is determined by his social relations and, secondly, social relations are determined by practice. Since the proletariat is in the right kind of practice, it is both in the proper locus of social relations and, therefore, it perceives both inevitability and objectivity. Yet, due to man's subjective dynamism, it is possible for other classes to adopt the standpoint of the proletariat. (shrink)

In the broadest sense, this intellectual biography is designed to give insight into the reasons why Western values and institutions failed to take root in the Chinese environment. Three interrelated themes are treated by Professor Duiker: the evolution of the Chinese educational system from the beginning of the 20th century to World War II; the process by which a Chinese intellectual absorbed Western values and attitudes while retaining significant elements of his traditional Confucian world view; the goals of the humanist (...) movement in early republican China and the reasons for its failure. Ts'ai, as first Minister of Education under the 1912 republic, helped to formulate educational policies during an important stage of transition in modern China. Later, as chancellor of Peking University, he was a central figure in the tumultuous events of the May Fourth period. Having been educated traditionally to the doctoral level before studying at a European university, Ts'ai attempted to synthesize the humanist side of the Confucian tradition with the libertarian elements in Western culture. Ts'ai's synthesis was unique but ultimately unsuccessful. Penn State Study No. 41. (shrink)

The hypergrowth and hyperconnectivity of networks of artificial intelligence (AI) systems and algorithms increasingly cause our interactions with the world, socially and environmentally, more technologically mediated. AI systems start interfering with our choices or making decisions on our behalf: what we see, what we buy, which contents or foods we consume, where we travel to, who we hire, etc. It is imperative to understand the dynamics of human-computer interaction in the age of progressively more competent AI. This essay presents five (...) premises to serve as starting points for building our understanding of the “interactions’ in human-computer interactions. (shrink)

OpenAI’s Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer (ChatGPT), Google’s Bard and other generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies can greatly enhance the capability of healthcare profess...

This article synthesizes the current theoretical attempts to understand human-machine interactions and introduces seven premises to understand our emerging dynamics with increasingly competent, pervasive, and instantly accessible algorithms. The hope that these seven premises can build toward a social theory of human-AI cocreation. The focus on human-AI cocreation is intended to emphasize two factors. First, is the fact that our machine learning systems are socialized. Second, is the coevolving nature of human mind and AI systems as smart devices form an (...) indispensable part of our cognitive scaffolds, thus, shaping how we perceive the world and ourselves. The seven premises include: primacy of social structures; human’s desire for freedom and autonomy; AI systems will form inseparable parts of our cognitive/affective scaffolds and can change our self-understanding; philosophy and humanistic foundations on human flourishing as a guide to human-AI interaction; mindsponge information-filtering process; acculturative process of how values change and emerge from human-AI interaction; overlapping Venn diagram of the human-human, human-nature, and human-machine interactions. This article concludes with a discussion on human agency in our entanglements with socialized machines and the illusoriness of the Cartesian agent view of the mind. (shrink)

With focus on the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the digital health context, we consider the following questions: How does the European Union (EU) seek to facilitate the development and uptake of trustworthy AI systems through the AI Act? What does trustworthiness and trust mean in the AI Act, and how are they linked to some of the ongoing discussions of these terms in bioethics, law, and philosophy? What are the normative components of trustworthiness? And how (...) do the requirements of the AI Act relate to these components? We first explain how the EU seeks to create an epistemic environment of trust through the AI Act to facilitate the development and uptake of trustworthy AI systems. The legislation establishes a governance regime that operates as a socio-epistemological infrastructure of trust which enables a performative framing of trust and trustworthiness. The degree of success that performative acts of trust and trustworthiness have achieved in realising the legislative goals may then be assessed in terms of statutorily defined proxies of trustworthiness. We show that to be trustworthy, these performative acts should be consistent with the ethical principles endorsed by the legislation; these principles are also manifested in at least four key features of the governance regime. However, specified proxies of trustworthiness are not expected to be adequate for applications of AI systems within a regulatory sandbox or in real-world testing. We explain why different proxies of trustworthiness for these applications may be regarded as ‘special’ trust domains and why the nature of trust should be understood as participatory. (shrink)

Biometric technologies are becoming more pervasive in the workplace, augmenting managerial processes such as hiring, monitoring and terminating employees. Until recently, these devices consisted mainly of GPS tools that track location, software that scrutinizes browser activity and keyboard strokes, and heat/motion sensors that monitor workstation presence. Today, however, a new generation of biometric devices has emerged that can sense, read, monitor and evaluate the affective state of a worker. More popularly known by its commercial moniker, Emotional AI, the technology stems (...) from advancements in affective computing. But whereas previous generations of biometric monitoring targeted the exterior physical body of the worker, concurrent with the writings of Foucault and Hardt, we argue that emotion-recognition tools signal a far more invasive disciplinary gaze that exposes and makes vulnerable the inner regions of the worker-self. Our paper explores attitudes towards empathic surveillance by analyzing a survey of 1015 responses of future job-seekers from 48 countries with Bayesian statistics. Our findings reveal affect tools, left unregulated in the workplace, may lead to heightened stress and anxiety among disadvantaged ethnicities, gender and income class. We also discuss a stark cross-cultural discrepancy whereby East Asians, compared to Western subjects, are more likely to profess a trusting attitude toward EAI-enabled automated management. While this emerging technology is driven by neoliberal incentives to optimize the worksite and increase productivity, ultimately, empathic surveillance may create more problems in terms of algorithmic bias, opaque decisionism, and the erosion of employment relations. Thus, this paper nuances and extends emerging literature on emotion-sensing technologies in the workplace, particularly through its highly original cross-cultural study. (shrink)

This paper conducts a comparative analysis of data governance mechanisms concerning the secondary use of health data in Taiwan and the European Union (EU). Both regions have adopted distinctive approaches and regulations for utilizing health data beyond primary care, encompassing areas such as medical research and healthcare system enhancement. Through an examination of these models, this study seeks to elucidate the strategies, frameworks, and legal structures employed by Taiwan and the EU to strike a delicate balance between the imperative of (...) data-driven healthcare innovation and the safeguarding of individual privacy rights. This paper examines and compares several key aspects of the secondary use of health data in Taiwan and the EU. These aspects include data governance frameworks, legal and regulatory frameworks, data access and sharing mechanisms, and privacy and security considerations. This comparative exploration offers invaluable insights into the evolving global landscape of health data governance. It provides a deeper understanding of the strategies implemented by these regions to harness the potential of health data while upholding the ethical and legal considerations surrounding its secondary use. The findings aim to inform best practices for responsible and effective health data utilization, particularly in the context of medical AI applications. (shrink)

From predicting medical conditions to administering health behavior interventions, artificial intelligence technologies are being developed to enhance patient care and outcomes. However, as Mélanie Terrasse and coauthors caution in an article in this issue of the Hastings Center Report, an overreliance on virtual technologies may depersonalize medical interactions and erode therapeutic relationships. The increasing expectation that patients will be actively engaged in their own care, regardless of the patients’ desire, technological literacy, and economic means, may also violate patients’ autonomy and (...) exacerbate access. Moreover, since AI design is both a technical and social process, algorithms may mirror human biases, calling into question the vision of AI technologies surpassing human judgment and avoiding prejudices in decision‐making. The best answer to these problems is to develop AI health technologies as part of a culture of health care quality improvement, responding to existing needs while being proactive about potential technical and ethical problems that can arise from the technologies’ design and implementation. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in medicine are gradually changing biomedical research and patient care. High expectations and promises from novel AI applications aiming to positively impact society raise new ethical considerations for patients and caregivers who use these technologies. Based on a qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews and focus groups with healthcare professionals (HCPs), patients, and family members of patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD), the present study investigates participant views on the comparative benefits and problems of using human versus (...) AI predictive computer vision health monitoring, as well as participants’ ethical concerns regarding these technologies. Participants presumed that AI monitoring would enhance information sharing and treatment, but voiced concerns about data ownership, data protection, commercialization of patient data, and privacy at home. They highlighted that privacy issues at home and data security issues are often linked and should be investigated together. Findings may help technologists, HCPs, and policymakers determine how to incorporate stakeholders’ intersecting but divergent concerns into developing and implementing AI PD monitoring tools. (shrink)

This paper interrogates the growing pervasiveness of affect recognition tools as an emerging layer human-centric automated management in the global workplace. While vendors tout the neoliberal incentives of emotion-recognition technology as a pre-eminent tool of workplace wellness, we argue that emotional AI recalibrates the horizons of capital not by expanding outward into the consumer realm (like surveillance capitalism). Rather, as a new genus of digital Taylorism, it turns inward, passing through the corporeal exterior to extract greater surplus value and managerial (...) control from the affective states of workers. Thus, empathic surveillance signals a profound shift in the ontology of human labor relations. In the emotionally quantified workplace, employees are no longer simply seen as physical capital, but conduits of actuarial and statistical intelligence gleaned from their most intimate subjective states. As a result, affect-driven automated management means that priority is often given to actuarial rather than human-centered managerial decisions. (shrink)

To evaluate the moral awareness of college students regarding artificial intelligence (AI) systems, we have examined 467 surveys collected from 152 Japanese and 315 non-Japanese students in an international university in Japan. The students were asked to choose a most significant moral problem of AI applications in the future from a list of ten ethical issues and to write an essay about it. The results show that most of the students (n = 269, 58%) considered unemployment to be the major (...) ethical issue related to AI. The second largest group of students (n = 54, 12%) was concerned with ethical issues related to emotional AI, including the impact of AI on human behavior and emotion and robots’ rights and emotions. A relatively small number of students referred to the risk of social control by AI (6%), AI discrimination (6%), increasing inequality (5%), loss of privacy (4%), AI mistakes (3%), malicious AI (3%), and AI security breaches (3%). Calculation of the z score for two population proportions shows that Japanese students were much less concerned about AI control of society (− 3.1276, p < 0.01) than non-Japanese students, but more concerned about discrimination (2.2757, p < 0.05). Female students were less concerned about unemployment (− 2.6108, p < 0.01) than males, but more concerned about discrimination (2.4333, p < 0.05). The study concludes that the moral awareness of college students regarding AI technologies is quite limited and recommends including the ethics of AI in the curriculum. (shrink)

The Buddhist Jātaka tells the tale of a hare lounging under a palm tree who becomes convinced the Earth is coming to an end when a ripe bael fruit falls on its head. Soon all the hares are running; other animals join them, forming a stampede of deer, boar, elk, buffalo, wild oxen, rhinoceros, tigers and elephants, loudly proclaiming the earth is ending.1 In the American retelling, the hare is ‘chicken little,’ and the exaggerated fear is that the sky is (...) falling. The story offers a cautionary tale for considering the trend towards calamity thinking in artificial intelligence (AI). A growing chorus of tech leaders has warned that AI poses existential risk (X-Risk) that could result in the extinction of the human species, the collapse of civilisation, or a colossal decline in human potential and culture. In 2014, Hawking told the Washington Post that AI, ‘could spell the end of the human race’.2 Musk has repeatedly warned about AI’s perils, calling AI, ‘more dangerous than nukes’, recommending colonising Mars to ensure ‘a bolt-hole if AI goes rogue and turns on humanity’,3 and donating 10 million dollars to the Future of Life Institute to jumpstart research on AI’s X-Risk. Gates has stated, ‘I am in the camp…concerned about super intelligence…I agree with … Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned’.4 Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has fretted that technologies OpenAI was building could endanger humanity—‘even destroying the world as we know it’.5 This paper offers a critical appraisal of the rise of calamity thinking in the scholarly AI ethics literature. It cautions against viewing X-Risk in isolation and highlights ethical considerations sidelined when X-Risk takes centre stage. Section I introduces a working definition of X-Risk, considers its likelihood and …. (shrink)

“Throw away anything that sounds too complicated. Only keep what is simple to grasp...If the information appears fuzzy and causes the brain to implode after two sentences, toss it away and stop listening. Doing so will make the news as orderly and simple to understand as the truth.” - In “GHG emissions,” The Kingfisher Story Collection, (Vuong 2022a).

After reading the essays of Mr. Ts'ai and Mr. Chu, I have a few immature opinions. Generally speaking, I feel that in dealing with the errors of their opponents, both Ts'ai I in his criticism of Huang Yüeh-mien and Chu Kuang-ch'ien in his criticism of Ts'ai I are quite accurate and convincing. However, in presenting their own arguments of what is right, both of them are on shaky ground and in error. That is because in one way or another, consciously (...) or unconsciously, they either deny the objective aspect of the existence of beauty or deny the social aspect of the existence of beauty . All of them consider the objective and the social aspects of beauty as being either this or that, as mutually exclusive and irreconcilable opposites. They think that if we acknowledge the social aspect of beauty, we then have to deny the objective aspect, the fact that the existence of beauty does not depend on the subjective conditions of a person ; or if we acknowledge the objective aspect, we have to deny the social aspect, the fact that the existence of beauty depends on the social life of human beings. But in fact it is not like that. On the one hand, beauty cannot be separated from human society; on the other hand, it can have an objective existence which is independent of man's subjective consciousness. It is this question that I shall discuss. (shrink)

With the intensifying shortage of care-providers and mounting financial burden of an aging population in Japan, artificial intelligence (AI) offers a potential solution through AI-driven robots, chatbots, smartphone apps, and other AI medical services. Yet Japanese acceptance of medical AI, especially patient care, largely depends on the degree of ‘humanness’ that can be integrated into intelligent technologies. As empathy is considered a core value in the practice of healthcare workers, artificially intelligent agents must have the ability to perceive human emotions (...) and respond in an affective, human-like manner. This paper presents the results of a nationwide survey in Japan 2023 about the public perception of the use of emotionalized AI (EAI) in healthcare. The sample included 2000 Japanese citizens from 20 to 69 years old with an average age of 45 years. The questionnaire included 65 items in six categories: demographic, perception of the existing healthcare system, attitude towards the use of AI, and EAI in healthcare, trust and privacy concerns and fear of AI, and seeking literacy on new technologies. The analysis of the responses demonstrates that overall, the Japanese population has a limited knowledge of AI, EAI, and smart technologies but trusts the healthcare system, physicians, and staff to use it properly, with little worries over the potential pitfalls related to data security and safety. However, they prefer the use of more human resources and are concerned about privacy and the high cost of new technology, and believe little information is being provided to them through government and media. (shrink)

This work examines the importance of distinguishing different levels of psychological explanation and the primacy of the computational level over implementational levels. The framework of levels allows us to recognize the role of formal theories as tools for specifying reasoning tasks at the computational level. It is shown that formal specifications of reasoning tasks allow us to analyze the complexity of the specified tasks and also serve to define reasoning competence and performance errors. Complexity analysis helps us identify tractable, practically (...) significant, subclasses of inference. The identification of these subclasses provides useful ante hoc and post hoc specifications for AI programming projects and psychological modeling. Formalization and complexity analysis also enable us to examine tradeoffs between tractability and range of applicability of implementations of a reasoning task. It is undesirable to obtain tractability at the expense of limiting the applicability of a cognitive mechanism to an unreal situation or a toy domain. It is argued that this undesirable result can be avoided if we examine the structure of the environment in which a mechanism is supposed to work and the environmental assumptions that make the computation tractable. Finally, it is demonstrated that many problems the human mind needs to solve in normal environments are indeed tractable and that the mind is equipped with adaptive mechanisms to solve them efficiently. This demonstration undermines a skeptical challenge to human rationality based on claims that many problems are intractable and that the capacity of the human mind is limited. (shrink)