Many researchers and intellectuals warn about extreme risks from artificial intelligence. However, these warnings typically came without systematic arguments in support. This paper provides an argument that AI will lead to the permanent disempowerment of humanity, e.g. human extinction, by 2100. It rests on four substantive premises which it motivates and defends: first, the speed of advances in AI capability, as well as the capability level current systems have already reached, suggest that it is practically possible to build AI systems (...) capable of disempowering humanity by 2100. Second, due to incentives and coordination problems, if it is possible to build such AI, it will be built. Third, since it appears to be a hard technical problem to build AI which is aligned with the goals of its designers, and many actors might build powerful AI, misaligned powerful AI will be built. Fourth, because disempowering humanity is useful for a large range of misaligned goals, such AI will try to disempower humanity. If AI is capable of disempowering humanity and tries to disempower humanity by 2100, then humanity will be disempowered by 2100. This conclusion has immense moral and prudential significance. (shrink)

If a machine attains consciousness, how could we find out? In this paper, I make three related claims regarding positive tests of machine consciousness. All three claims center on the idea that an AI can be constructed “ad hoc”, that is, with the purpose of satisfying a particular test of consciousness while clearly not being conscious. First, a proposed test of machine consciousness can be legitimate, even if AI can be constructed ad hoc specifically to pass this test. This is (...) underscored by the observation that many, if not all, putative tests of machine consciousness can be passed by non-conscious machines via ad hoc means. Second, we can identify ad hoc AI by taking inspiration from the notion of an ad hoc hypothesis in philosophy of science. Third, given the first and the second claim, the most reliable tests of animal consciousness turn out to be valid and useful positive tests of machine consciousness as well. If a non-ad hoc AI exhibits clusters of cognitive capacities facilitated by consciousness in humans which can be selectively switched off by masking and if it reproduces human behavior in suitably designed double dissociation tasks, we should treat the AI as conscious. (shrink)

1. 1.1. Suffering is bad. This is why, ceteris paribus, there are strong moral reasons to prevent suffering. Moreover, typically, those moral reasons are stronger when the amount of suffering at st...

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) "Policy for the Management of Terminally Ill Patients Who May Become Organ Donors after Death" proposes to take organs from certain patients as soon as possible after expected cardiopulmonary death. This policy requires clear understanding of the descriptive state of the donor's critical cardiopulmonary and neurologic functional capacity at the time interventions to sustain or harvest organs are undertaken. It also requires strong consensus about the moral and legal status of the donor during (...) dying and confirmation of death. There has been no need for the clarity and precision that this policy relies upon, and thus the needed research and conceptual work has not previously been generated. The empiric base and societal consensus are both too frail to provide justification for this policy at this time. (shrink)

This book educates whilst also challenging the contemporary schools of thought within philosophical and religious ethics. In addition, it underlines the fact that the substance of ethics in general and bioethics/healthcare ethics specifically, is much more expansive and inclusive than is usually thought. Bioethics is a relatively new academic discipline. However, ethics has existed informally since before the time of Hippocrates. The indigenous culture of African peoples has an ethical worldview which predates the western discourse. This indigenous ethical worldview has (...) been orally transmitted over centuries. The earliest known written African text containing some concepts and content of ethics is the “Declaration of Innocence” written in 1500 B.C., found in an Egyptian text. Ubuntu is an example of African culture that presents an ethical worldview. This work interprets the culture of Ubuntu to explain the contribution of a representative indigenous African ethics to global bioethics. Many modern scholars have written about the meaning of Ubuntu for African societies over centuries. Some scholars have viewed Ubuntu as the greatest contribution of African cultures to other world cultures. None of the scholars, however has explored the culture of Ubuntu as providing a representative indigenous ethics that can contribute to global bioethics as discussed in this book.​. (shrink)

This article is based on a distinctive study that seeks to analyse the nascent role of teenagers’ activism and protests for climate change action. With the increasing realisation of children's rights to participation, the past few years have marked the rise of the new dispensation of climate activism and protests in which teenagers have occupied the centre stage. We pay specific reference to Greta Thunberg, a Swedish child climate activist, in as much as she can set a framework upon which (...) Africa can draw parallels, lessons and insights for climate activism and protests. Even though the context may be different, the paper attempts to inform vibrant climate action through activism by children and ultimately climate policies, laws and management for environmental sustainability in Africa. We engaged document review and thematic approaches, and it emerged that children climate activism and protests in Africa are not as vibrant as they should be given the prevalence of climate inaction across the continent. Therefore, there is much to learn from Thunberg by pushing national governments and regional organisations to increase the decision-making space of children in the fight against climate change. (shrink)

What is wrong with participating in a democratic decision-making process, and then doing something other than the outcome of the decision? It is often thought that collective decision-making entails being prima facie bound to the outcome of that decision, although little analysis has been done on why that is the case. Conventional perspectives are inadequate to explain its wrongness. I offer a new and more robust analysis on the nature of voting: voting when you will accept the outcome only if (...) the decision goes your way is an act of bad faith: you are not taking part in a ‘process that decides what we will do’. This analysis sheds light on understanding the intrinsic nature of voting and what we are doing when we make decisions collectively. (shrink)

Abstract:Because the demand for intensive care unit (ICU) beds exceeds the supply in general, and because of the formidable costs of that level of care, clinicians face ethical issues when rationing this kind of care not only at the point of admission to the ICU, but also after the fact. Under what conditions—if any—may patients be denied admission to the ICU or removed after admission? One professional medical group has defended a rule of “first come, first served” in ICU admissions, (...) and this approach has numerous moral considerations in its favor. We show, however, that admission to the ICU is not in and of itself guaranteed; we also show that as a matter of principle, it can be morally permissible to remove certain patients from the ICU, contrary to the idea that because they were admitted first, they are entitled to stay indefinitely through the point of recovery, death, or voluntary withdrawal. What remains necessary to help guide these kinds of decisions is the articulation of clear standards for discontinuing intensive care, and the articulation of these standards in a way consistent with not only fiduciary and legal duties that attach to clinical care but also with democratic decision making processes. (shrink)

Contrary to what seems to be predicted by a Strawson-inspired view, in presupposition denials the presupposition triggered by, e.g., ‘the king of France’ seems to be cancelled. To explain this puzzling instance of the projection problem, defenders of a Strawson-inspired view have proposed various ad hoc ambiguities. I develop a version of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory that explains the puzzling presupposition-cancelling phenomenon relying only on independently motivated pragmatic processes. Appealing to Kripke’s “test” for the adequacy of ambiguity motivating counterexamples, I (...) argue that my analysis is to be preferred over proposals that posit ad hoc ambiguities. Two key insights of my analysis are, first, that the “cancellation” of presuppositions in presupposition denials depends upon the illocutionary effects of rejection and correction, and, second, that the process of presupposition accommodation often involves the speaker performing an ancillary sort of speech act, viz. the speech act of presupposing. (shrink)

In an article recently published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the legal scholar Helen Reece argues that the prevalence and effects of rape myths have been overstated and the designation of certain beliefs and attitudes as myths is simply wrong. Feminist researchers, she argues, are engaged ‘in a process of creating myths about myths’ in a way that serves to close down and limit productive debate in this ‘vexed’ area. In this article we argue that Reece’s analysis is (...) methodologically flawed, crudely reductionist and rhetorically unyielding. We locate Reece’s analysis within the wider theoretical field to show how her failure to engage with feminist literature on rape other than in the narrowest, most exclusionary terms, yields an approach which impedes rather than advances public understanding and panders to a kind of simplistic thinking which cannot begin to grapple with the complexity of the phenomenon that is rape. We conclude by emphasizing the continuing commitment of feminist researchers carefully to theorize and map the fraught field of progressive legal strategizing in order to identify and counter the kinds of risks and shortcomings of political activism with which Reece is rightly concerned. (shrink)

Designed for Pilates and yoga teachers, health and rehabilitation professionals, The Power and the Grace demystifies functional movement and integrates the science of movement with the art of teaching it. It aims to help the holistically minded movement professional achieve rewarding results in neuromuscular function. From brain science to physics, fascia to emotion, this book distils a seemingly complex field into a practical and instantly usable approach that will resonate with movement teachers at all levels of experience. Find the color (...) in your language; learn the difference between talking to the brain or to the mind; and discover how to communicate the intention and sense of a movement with ease! (shrink)

El artículo trata de la cristología en las enarrationes del año 392 sobre los salmos 1-32 y dos, señalando que están llenas de enseñanzas católicas acerca de Cristo, cabeza y cuerpo. Señala que ellas son un reto para la eclesiología donatista, presentando Agustín una nueva eclesiología, con el consecuente desarrollo de su cristología.

Advances in science have led to a new vision for toxicity testing based on human cell systems that will be more predictive, have higher throughput, cost less money, and be more comparable to real‐life exposures in humans, while using many fewer animals. This vision, embraced by leading scientific and regulatory groups, is a paradigm shift from animal‐based to human‐based testing that signals a major change in focus and promotes the development of new approaches to understanding the toxicity of chemicals in (...) humans. Information gained from these new approaches will likely affect other areas of research as well, leading to less reliance on animals in the future. (shrink)

Although there is a long-standing international debate concerning the privatization and corporatization of health services, there has been relatively little systematic analysis of the ways these types of reform manifest. We examine the impact of privatization and corporatization on public hospitals, and in particular on hospitals’ autonomy and accountability, with two aims: to uncover the key themes in the literature, and to consider implementation issues. The review of 2,319 articles was conducted using content analysis and a discussion of selected key (...) issues. Several major themes appear in the privatization and corporatization literature, including their use as tools in health systems reform, and the role of governments in sponsoring the processes. We show that much of the underlying argument is ideological rather than evidence based. Those who promote versions of privatization or corporatization claim that decreased government involvement in the management of hospitals leads inter alia to benefits such as greater efficiency, better quality services, and increased choice for patients. Those who argue against say that increased privatization leads to deleterious outcomes such as decreased equity, compromised efficiency and poorer quality of care. The evidence is often weak and at times conflicting. Privatization and corporatization are difficult to implement, and at best produce mixed results, and their impact seems to depend more on the motivation of the evaluator than the standard of the results. These debates are of a type that is to a large extent only resolvable ideologically. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:George J. Leonard EMERSON, WHITMAN, AND CONCEPTUAL ART The widespread abandoning of the art object at the end of the 1960s was taken as something radically, even frighteningly, new, by critics and artists alike. Objects, concept artist Joseph Kosuth was asserting by 1969, are "irrelevant" to art. Though an artist might choose, as in the past, to "employ" objects, "all art is finally conceptual." In fact it was (...) now time that the object, nothing more than the "physical residue" of the artist's mental activity, was dispensed with.1 "We / open our eyes and ears seeing life / each day excellent as it is," John Cage chanted: "This / realization no longer needs art...."2 Aestheticians as disparate as Murray Krieger and Harold Rosenberg reacted to this "transfiguration of the commonplace," as Arthur Danto has called it. Danto has gained a wide scholarly audience for his ideas about the 1960s as "the end of art," or at least as the beginning of "post-historical art."3 We know from such works as Renato Poggioli's TL· T^ry oftL· Avant-Garde that, in this century, particular movements have routinely declared themselves to be art's climax.4 Critics like Jacques Barzun and artists like Amedee Ozenfant had been saying for years that art was exhausted. Yet conceptualism's attack on the object struck most critics as something both alarming and new: Irving Sandler wrote in a special edition of the College Art Association's Art Journal devoted to the problem that it demolished "every notion of what art should be,"5 and Murray Krieger feared that this "leap beyond Pop Art" would "complete the obliteration of the realm of art, its objects, its museums...."6 But the conceptualist attacks on the art object were, in fact, not new. One can find attacks as scathing in Emerson and Whitman; so scathing, that criticism has rarely taken them seriously. The attacks the concep297 298Philosophy and Literature tualists mounted in the 1960s were only the culmination ofan intellectual tendency which appeared throughout the West one hundred and sixty years before. It has long been a scholarly commonplace that after 1800 an "intellectual tendency"—as M. H. Abrams finallytermed it—extolling the possibilities of this world emerged in all parts of Western culture. When itappears in literature we nowusually call it, withAbrams, Natural Supernaturalism; or, with Harold Bloom, the "visionary company." Man, Wordsworth decreed, can and must learn to find "Paradise" in "the common day."7 Surprisingly litde work has been done on what happened when this intellectual tendency, Natural Supernaturalism, confronted the art object. Emerson and Whitman can stand for many who were necessarily ill at ease with the idea of art objects as elite objects superior to the common things it was their mission to extol. Wordsworth works before these two; Ruskin develops similar ideas into greater complexity; but since Emerson writes clear expository prose and avoids fanciful terminology, he makes a good place to enter this dark wood. Let us begin with some straightfor-ward, overdue interdisciplinary history, reading Emerson on the art object, noticing similar passages in Whitman, and noting where Emerson has reworked Hegel for his own ends. For Emerson objects are but thought's "inert effect," as for the concept artist Kosuth they would be but the "physical residue" of the artist's activity. Emerson and Kosuth, opposite Shakespeare, do not applaud the art process as the giving to an airy nothing a local habitation and a name; rather they disdain the stuff as petrifactions, as dead mud footprints left by living thoughts diat have raced away.8 In his essay "Circles," Emerson derides our admiration for a work of architecture, directing us to the "litde waving hand" that built it, for "that which builds is better than that which is built." By the same logic, the invisible thoughts which truly wrought the object were even better than the hand and "nimbler."9 When such passages are discussed at all, they are usually considered Platonic,10 but, in his essay "Art," Emerson envisions a use for art objects Plato would have blinked at. For the time being, art objects have a particular "office" to fill. That office, Emerson wrote in... (shrink)

Despite the fact that corporate law firms attract some of the most intelligent and productive minds in business today, they have failed to cultivate a workplace that facilitates healthy and balanced lives for their practitioners. Workplace stress in the sector is manifest in a culture which continues to sanction 'rite of passage' work practices which bolster earnings for those at the apex but are proving sickening to many. This culture inhibits basic ethical human interaction based on decency and respect and (...) cultivates oppression through fear of failure. Not surprisingly then, bullying is tolerated and lawyer attrition is rife, particularly for junior women lawyers. This article considers the impact of bullying in Australian corporate law firms. Foucauldian thought is utilised in order to better understand first, how the organisational culture in major law firms continues to authorise practices which prove injurious to practitioners' health and secondly, the resulting lawyer attrition. It is argued that the 'disciplinary technologies' being adopted by management function to assure an economy of power relations which not only facilitates conformity with the values and imperatives of the firm but also, the quelling of subversion and resistance to its effects. Standpoint theory is adopted to examine the workplace harms being borne by junior lawyers through a narrative 'Snapshot' of the experience of a female, mature-aged, junior lawyer working as a solicitor at a top tier Australian corporate law firm. Her detailed account illuminates recent quantitative empirical research into the experiences of Australian women lawyers and lays bare the culture of fear and workings of power, violence and marginalisation within the firm. (shrink)

This paper is a commentary on C. Richard Panico’s article “Naked Leadership: Lead to Win Hearts and Minds.” The relationship between academic and practitioner literature on leadership is symbiotic. Both approaches have their limitations. Academic theories may be impractical and practitioner’s ideas are sometimes anecdotal and highly contextual. Yet, as the paper demonstrates, the two literatures can overlap in interesting ways.

Recent publications have traced a relation of influence between Nietzsche's philosophy and Freudianpsychoanalysis. While Freud is certainly intellectually indebted to Nietzsche, the present paper emphasisesthe significant difference between these philosophers' works: Namely, that they exhibit a differenteconomy, and are thus committed to competing theoretical structures. This difference comes to the fore inthe approach that each takes to elaborating the mind-body relation, and especially in the contrast betweenFreud's early neuroscientific speculations and Nietzsche's emphasis uponlanguage, and particularly metaphor. In order to illustrate (...) this ‘economical’ difference between their theories, the paper critiques Freud's early commitment to neurological discourse using Nietzsche's genealogical method. (shrink)

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the search for low-mass magnetic monopoles. At the University of Oklahoma we are performing an experiment (Fermilab E882) using material from the old D0 and CDF detectors to set limits on the existence of Dirac monopoles of masses of the order of 500 GeV. To set such limits, estimates must be made of the production rate of such monopoles at the Tevatron collider, and of the binding strength of any such produced monopoles to (...) matter. Here we sketch the still primitive theory of such interactions, and indicate why we believe a credible limit may still be obtained. On the other hand, there have been proposals that the classic Euler–Heisenberg Lagrangian together with duality could be employed to set limits on magnetic monopoles having masses less than 1 TeV, based on virtual, rather than real processes. The D0 collaboration at Fermilab has used such a proposal to set mass limits based on the nonobservation of pairs of photons each with high transverse momentum. We critique the underlying theory, by showing that the cross section violates unitarity at the quoted limits and is unstable with respect to radiative corrections. We therefore believe that no significant limit can be obtained from the current experiments, based on virtual monopole processes. (shrink)

This article considers how schools are addressing harmful sexual behaviour occurring between students. In the context of policy and school inspection, driven by student disclosures of sexual harm, schools are being required to evidence responses to sexual harassment and abuse within and beyond school. Presenting findings from 14 school audits the article highlights evidence of the levers where schools claim they are achieving well and those where they self-assessed lowest. The findings are based on analysis of 14 school assessments. The (...) findings evidence that schools more readily develop statutory policy processes and are less equipped to address cultural elements driving harmful and unsafe environments. The findings have implications for how schools are supported to address sexual harm and what drives changes in this area. (shrink)

The Dobbs decision has precipitated renewed medical, political, and professional interest in the issue of abortion. Because this decision handed responsibility for regulation of abortion back to the states, and because the states are enacting or have enacted policies that tend to be very permissive or very restrictive, the result has been legal and professional confusion for physicians and their patients. Medical education cannot resolve either the legal or ethical issues regarding abortion. However, medical education must prepare future physicians for (...) caring for patients seeking abortion-related services. Physicians must be prepared to interact appropriately (sensitively and with integrity) with patients or colleagues whose views on abortion differ significantly from their own. This essay describes our educational effort to achieve that objective. The motto that governed this exercise was “No Easy Answers.”. (shrink)

Rorty's neopragmatism is an attempt to retrofit Dewey's experimentalism for the post-modern situation. Specifically, he substitutes "language" for "experience" and "culture" for "science", to arrive at a philosophy "no closer to science than to art". I argue that the first move results from misunderstanding of the role experience plays in the context of verification in Dewey's experimental logic. The second move leaves Rorty without any alternative method even for approaching the very problems which Dewey proposed to solve with his experimentalism.

Steroid hormones are signaling molecules important for normal growth, development and differentiation of multicellular organisms. Brassinosteroids (BRs) are a class of polyhydroxylated steroids that are necessary for plant development. Molecular genetic studies in Arabidopsis thaliana have led to the cloning and characterization of the BR receptor, BRI1, which is a transmembrane receptor serine/threonine kinase. The extracellular domain of BRI1, which is composed mainly of leucine‐rich repeats, can confer BR responsivity to heterologous cells and is required for BR binding. Although downstream (...) components of BR action are mostly unknown, multiple genes whose expression are regulated by BRs have been identified and suggest mechanisms by which BRs affect cell elongation and division. BioEssays 23:1028–1036, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This article studies the proposal of the twentieth-century anticaste scholar and writer Iyothee Thass of a millennial anticaste communitas (community) in creative opposition to caste immunitas (immunity). It argues that Thass’s casteless community makes an appeal as it withdraws from caste and Brahminism by differentiating itself from enclosure. Thass’s works sought to conceive and construct a community against caste in the vernacular both in the global and local context by way of a highly scholarly as well as creative engagement with (...) Buddhism and the Tamil literary archive. In the colonial and nationalist context of the nineteenth century in the Indian subcontinent, his interpretative imaginaire of the history of India—Indhira Dhesa Sarithiram—was a pedagogy that establishes a belonging to world community and, at the same time, to one’s own vernacular communities. (shrink)