There is general consensus that explainable artificial intelligence is valuable, but there is significant divergence when we try to articulate why, exactly, it is desirable. This question must be distinguished from two other kinds of questions asked in the XAI literature that are sometimes asked and addressed simultaneously. The first and most obvious is the ‘how’ question—some version of: ‘how do we develop technical strategies to achieve XAI?’ Another question is specifying what kind of explanation is worth having in (...) the first place. As difficult and important as the challenges are in answering these questions, they are distinct from a third question: why do we want XAI at all? There is vast literature on this question as well, but I wish to explore a different kind of answer. The most obvious way to answer this question is by describing a desirable outcome that would likely be achieved with the right kind of explanation, which would make the explanation valuable instrumentally. That is, XAI is desirable to attain some other value, such as fairness, trust, accountability, or governance. This family of arguments is obviously important, but I argue that explanations are also intrinsically valuable, because unexplainable systems can be dehumanizing. I argue that there are at least three independently valid versions of this kind of argument: an argument from participation, from knowledge, and from actualization. Each of these arguments that XAI is intrinsically valuable is independently compelling, in addition to the more obvious instrumental benefits of XAI. (shrink)

This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of ethical issues raised by artificial intelligence (AI) in veterinary medicine for companion animals. Veterinary medicine is a socially valued service, which, like human medicine, will likely be significantly affected by AI. Veterinary AI raises some unique ethical issues because of the nature of the client–patient–practitioner relationship, society’s relatively minimal valuation and protection of nonhuman animals and differences in opinion about responsibilities to animal patients and human clients. The paper examines how these (...) distinctive features influence the ethics of AI systems that might benefit clients, veterinarians and animal patients—but also harm them. It offers practical ethical guidance that should interest ethicists, veterinarians, clinic owners, veterinary bodies and regulators, clients, technology developers and AI researchers. (shrink)

Most accounts of responsibility focus on one type of responsibility, moral responsibility, or address one particular aspect of moral responsibility such as agency. This article outlines a broader framework to think about responsibility that includes causal responsibility, relational responsibility, and what I call “narrative responsibility” as a form of “hermeneutic responsibility”, connects these notions of responsibility with different kinds of knowledge, disciplines, and perspectives on human being, and shows how this framework is helpful for mapping and analysing how artificial (...) intelligence (AI) challenges human responsibility and sense-making in various ways. Mobilizing recent hermeneutic approaches to technology, the article argues that next to, and interwoven with, other types of responsibility such as moral responsibility, we also have narrative and hermeneutic responsibility—in general and for technology. For example, it is our task as humans to make sense of, with and, if necessary, against AI. While from a posthumanist point of view, technologies also contribute to sense-making, humans are the experiencers and bearers of responsibility and always remain in charge when it comes to this hermeneutic responsibility. Facing and working with a world of data, correlations, and probabilities, we are nevertheless condemned to make sense. Moreover, this also has a normative, sometimes even political aspect: acknowledging and embracing our hermeneutic responsibility is important if we want to avoid that our stories are written elsewhere—through technology. (shrink)

Artificial life embodies a recent and important conceptual step in modem science: asserting that the core of intelligence and cognitive abilities is the same as the capacity for living. The recent surge of interest in artificial life has pushed a whole range of engineering traditions, such as control theory and robotics, beyond classical notions of goal and planning into biologically inspired notions of viability and adaptation, situatedness and operational closure. These proceedings serve two important functions: they address bottom-up (...) theories of artificial intelligence and explore what can be learned from simple models such as insects about the cognitive processes and characteristic autonomy of living organisms, while also engaging researchers and philosophers in an exciting examination of the epistemological basis of this new trend. Topics Artificial Animals • Genetic Algorithms • Autonomous Systems • Emergent Behaviors • Artificial Ecologies • Immunologic Algorithms • Self-Adapting Systems • Emergent Structures • Emotion And Motivation • Neural Networks • Coevolution • Fitness Landscapes Contributors H. Bersini, Domenico Parisi, Rodney A. Brooks, Christopher G. Langton, S. Kauffman, J.-L. Denenbourg, Pattie Maes, John Holland, T. Smithersm H. Swefel, H. Muhlenbein. (shrink)

En el siglo XVII, el fundador de la filosofía moderna, René Descartes, se basó en su teoría metafísica del dualismo de sustancias para afirmar que jamás podrían recrearse mediante disposiciones de la sustancia material dos cualidades exclusivas de la sustancia pensante: la capacidad para el lenguaje natural y la flexibilidad para habérselas con problemas de todo tipo. Casi cuatro siglos después, el pronóstico de Descartes todavía se cumple, y las dos cualidades por él señaladas se resisten a los intentos de (...) duplicación de la inteligencia artificial (IA) contemporánea. El presente artículo analiza las causas del acierto del filósofo francés. (shrink)

This talk by Dr. Peter D. Hershock makes use of Buddhist conceptual resources to assess how the emerging global attention economy and the confluence of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are reshaping the human experience. Like the Copernican revolution, which de-centered humanity in the cosmos, the intelligence revolution is dissolving once-foundational certainties and opening new realms of opportunity. The results are almost sure to be mixed. Smart cities will be more efficient and more livable; smart health care (...) can potentially reach and benefit the half of humanity that now lacks even basic health services. Yet, smart services and the algorithmic tailoring of individual experience have the potential to first supplement and eventually supplant intelligent human practices, rendering human intelligence superfluous. Focusing in particular on the karmic dimensions of these transformations, the talk will consider who we need to be present as in order to resist the allure of digital sirens and direct the intelligence revolution toward a truly equitable and ethical re-centering of the human. (shrink)

What can the actions of stockbreeders, as they select the best individuals for breeding, teach us about how new species of wild animals and plants come into being? Charles Darwin raised this question in his famous, even notorious, Origin of Species (1859). Darwin's answer - his argument by analogy from artificial to natural selection - is the subject of our book. We aim to clarify what kind of argument it is, how it works, and why Darwin gave it such (...) prominence. As we explain more fully in our Introduction, we believe that the argument becomes much more intelligible when set, contextually, in a story stretching from classical Greek mathematics to modern evolutionary genetics: a long story, and a broad one too, encompassing everything from Darwin's earliest notebook theorising on the births and deaths of species, to agrarian capitalism as a distinctive form of economic life, to shifting Western reflections on art-nature relations. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Homeostats for the 21st Century? Simulating Ashby Simulating the Brain” by Stefano Franchi. Upshot: The target article has addressed core concepts of Ashby’s generalized homeostasis thesis as well as its relevance to building complex artificial systems. In this commentary, I discuss Ashby-inspired approaches to designing for ultrastable behaviour in robots and the extent to which complex adaptive behaviour can be underdetermined by heteronomous constraints.

This paper argues for the role of technology, such as artificial intelligence, which includes machine learning, in managing conflicts between herders and farmers in Nigeria. Conflicts between itinerant Fulani herders and farmers over the years have resulted in the destruction of lives, properties, and the displacement of many indigenous communities across Nigeria, with devastating social, economic and political consequences. Over time, the conflicts have morphed into ethnic stereotypes, allegations of ethnic cleansing, forceful appropriation and divisive entrenchment of labels that (...) are inimical to national existence. The reality of climate change and increased urbanization suggest that conflicts are likely to exacerbate over shrinking resources in the near future. Finding solutions to the conflicts, therefore requires innovative thinking capable of addressing the limits of past approaches. While mindful of the human and political dimension of the conflicts, I argue using the method of philosophical analysis that technology possesses the capacity for social transformation, and make a case for the modernization of grazing culture and the curbing of crossborder grazing through machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence. Machine Learning represents a transformative technology that addresses the security challenges of irregular migration, accommodates the nomadic and subsistent mode of farming associated with the conflicting parties while enabling a gradual but stable transition to full modernization. I conclude that machine learning holds many prospects for minimizing conflicts and attaining social cohesion between herders and farmers when properly complemented by other mechanisms of social cohesion that may be political in nature. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the nature of a broad class of biomedical theories which I have termed "middle-range theories." I define them and relate the nature of biomedical theorizing to other investigations, such as a recent inquiry by the National Academy of Sciences. I also suggest that some of the knowledge representation tools from artificial intelligence may give us a purchase on this type of biological theorizing, and try to show in a rather preliminary and exploratory manner by (...) using the lac operon model of genetic control, what some of those AI applications, such as frames and semantic nets, might look like in this context. Finally, I suggest some difficulties, such as the non-monotonicity of reasoning, which such tools may generate. (shrink)

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Conventionally, Darwin's argument for this theory has been understood as based on an analogy with artificial selection. But there has been no consensus on how, exactly, this analogical argument is supposed to work – and some suspicion too that analogical arguments on the whole are embarrassingly weak. Drawing on new insights into the history of analogical argumentation from the ancient Greeks onward, as well as (...) on in-depth studies of Darwin's public and private writings, this book offers an original perspective on Darwin's argument, restoring to view the intellectual traditions which Darwin took for granted in arguing as he did. From this perspective come new appreciations not only of Darwin's argument but of the metaphors based on it, the range of wider traditions the argument touched upon, and its legacies for science after the Origin. (shrink)

My starting point is that discussions in philosophy about the ontology of technical artifacts ought to be informed by classificatory practices in engineering. Hence, the heuristic value of the natural-artificial distinction in engineering counts against arguments which favour abandoning the distinction in metaphysics. In this chapter, I present the philosophical equipment needed to analyse classificatory practices and then present a case study of engineering practice using these theoretical tools. More in particular, I make use of the Collectivist Account of (...) Technical Artifacts (CAT) according to which there are different classificatory practices for natural, artificial, and social objects. I demonstrate that in the community studied, artificial kinds are marked by distinctive classificatory practices. The presence of these distinctive classificatory practices in engineering with regard to artificial kinds should inform discussions about the ontology of technical artifacts just as the distinctive classificatory practices in natural science inform discussions about natural kinds. (shrink)

Recent years have illustrated how the reproductive realm is continuously drawing the attention of medical and legal experts worldwide. The availability of technological services to facilitate reproduction has led to serious concerns over the right to reproduce, which no longer is determined as a private/personal matter. The growing technological options do implicate fundamental questions about human dignity and social welfare. There has been an increased demand for determining (a) the rights of prisoners, unmarried and homosexuals to such services, (b) concerns (...) over child’s information and health needs, (c) claims for wrongful birth and wrongful life, (d) the role of donors and physicians, (e) posthumous reproduction etc. In addition, the role of national and international law has been emphasized for an efficient system of functioning and delivery. This paper is an attempt to explore the pressing claims to reproductive choices, coupled with a marked increase in demand for legislative intervention in India. (shrink)

The Conference on Artificial General Intelligence is the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. Its second installation, AGI-09, in Arlington, Virginia, March 6-9, 2009, attracted 67 paper submissions, which is a substantial increase from the previous year. Of these submissions, 33 (i.e., 49%) were accepted as full papers for presentation at the conference. Additional 13 papers were included as position papers. The (...) program also included a keynote address by Juergen Schmidhuber on 'The New AI', a post-conference workshop on 'The Future of AI', and a number of pre-conference tutorials on various topics related to AGI. (shrink)

Purpose Artificial intelligence and automation are currently changing human life with a great implication in the communication field. This research focusses on understanding the current and growing impact of AI and automation in the role of communication professionals to identify what skills and training are needed to face its impacts leading to a recommendation. Design/methodology/approach The research involves methodological triangulation, analysing and comparing data gathered from consulting with experts using the Delphi method, focus group with communication students, and literature (...) review. Findings Findings show that the likely impacts are on the one hand the enhancing of efficiency and productivity, as well as freeing communication professionals to focus on the creative side, strategy and analytical thinking, on the other hand, repetitive and low-level jobs could be lost, being higher position jobs or those involving creativity and decision making harder to automate. Two types of training are needed: to gather experience with the current AI and automated tools, and to focus on developing human qualities that AI cannot replicate. Originality/value The outcomes of this research are valuable to help current and future communication practitioners, as well as organisations, to be one step ahead and survive the age AI and automation, being aware of its current and near-future impacts. The paper offers a list of recommended soft and technical skills, as well as training needed, categorizing them in low, medium and high priority. (shrink)