•  93
    Machine agency and representation
    AI and Society 39 (1): 345-352. 2024.
    Theories of action tend to require agents to have mental representations. A common trope in discussions of artificial intelligence (AI) is that they do not, and so cannot be agents. Properly understood there may be something to the requirement, but the trope is badly misguided. Here we provide an account of representation for AI that is sufficient to underwrite attributions to these systems of ownership, action, and responsibility. Existing accounts of mental representation tend to be too demand…Read more
  •  58
    Machine agency
    The MIT Press. 2024.
    An accessible philosophy of technology textbook intended for interested students who don't necessarily have a background in philosophy of science.
  •  41
    Impermissible Targeting of Human Shields
    Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 109 (2): 171-194. 2023.
    An assumption underpinning the literature on human shields is that it is possible to distinguish between a voluntary shield and an involuntary shield. This is a claim I challenge with the purpose of demonstrating that the conventional basis on which we currently determine which human shields are liable to targeting is morally unjustifiable. Given the difficulty in tracking intentions, any presumption on the part of the targeting agent to know ex ante whether a civilian is volunteering to be a sh…Read more
  •  38
    The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots (review)
    Essays in Philosophy 23 (1): 116-119. 2022.
    How should we regard increasingly autonomous and human-like robots? Kate Darling’s monograph New Breed explores this terrain, with an eye to the conceptual, moral, and legal issues informing the debate. Darling’s thesis is simple: by drawing from humankind’s history with animals, we will learn how to incorporate future robots into our social world. Combining personal narrative, legal history, and case-studies, Darling tells a readable story that may just change what we think about when we think …Read more
  •  18
    Reading 'Black Mirror': Insights into Technology and the Post-Media Condition (review)
    London School of Economics Review of Books Blog. 2021.
    In Reading ‘Black Mirror’: Insights into Technology and the Post-Media Condition, German A. Duarte and Justin Michael Battin offer a new collection of essays that provides different frameworks for understanding, contextualising and appraising the influential science fiction TV anthology series, Black Mirror. While finding that the volume does not always fully cohere and often requires prior familiarity with twentieth-century French and German philosophy, there are a number of essays that are wor…Read more
  •  9
    Influence, War, and Ethics
    Journal of National Security Law and Policy 14 (1): 29-54. 2024.
    I contend existing international law frameworks are inadequate for explaining why certain foreign information-based influence campaigns are impermissible or troublesome. Moreover, I posits the warfare paradigm is both limiting and potentially dangerous. I then propose reframing the conversation about foreign information and influence campaigns to focus not on the nationality of the speaker or the source of the idea but rather on whether there is deception or mis/disinformation involved. It is fa…Read more
  •  1
    Idealism, realism, pragmatism: three modes of theorising within secular AI ethics
    with Rune Nyrup
    In Barry Solemain & I. Glenn Cohen (eds.), Research Handbook on Health, AI and the Law, Edward Edgar Publishing. pp. 203-2018. 2024.
    Healthcare applications of AI have the potential to produce great benefit, but also come with significant ethical risks. This has brought ethics to the forefront of academic, policy and public debates about AI in healthcare. To help navigate these debates, we distinguish three general modes of ethical theorizing in contemporary secular AI ethics: (1) idealism, which seeks to articulate moral ideals that can be applied to concrete problems; (2) realism, which focuses on understanding complex soci…Read more
  • In this chapter, I explore information-based influence in the context of epistemic security. My aim is to provide a topography of landscape and an assessment of how best to conceptualize contested terms in the discourse on influence. I begin with a foundational question: what is information-based foreign influence? I answer this question in section 2 with a structure that helps make sense of different activities and campaigns associated with information-based influence, which I refer to as ‘line…Read more