Damien P. Williams

Contemporary research into the values, bias, and prejudices within “Artificial Intelligence” tends to operate in a crux of scholarship in computer science and engineering, sociology, philosophy, and science and technology studies (STS). Even so, getting the STEM fields to recognize and accept the importance of certain kinds of knowledge— the social, experiential kinds of knowledge— remains an ongoing struggle. Similarly, religious scholarship is still very often missing from these conversations because many in the STEM fields and the general public feel that religion and technoscientific investigations are and should be separate fields of inquiry. Here I demonstrate that experiential knowledge and religious, even occult beliefs are always already embedded within and crucial to understanding the sociotechnical imaginaries animating many technologies, particularly in the areas of “AI.” In fact, it is precisely the unwillingness of many to confront these facts which allow for both the problems of prejudice embedded in algorithmic systems, and for the hype-laden marketing of the corporations and agencies developing them. This same hype then intentionally obfuscates the actions of both the systems and the people who create them, while confounding and oppressing those most often made subject to them. Further, I highlight a crucial continuity between bigotry and systemic social projects (eugenics, transhumanism, and “supercrip” narratives), revealing their foundation in white supremacist colonialist myths of whose and which kinds of lives count as “truly human.” We will examine how these myths become embedded into the religious practices, technologies, and social frameworks in and out of which “AI” and algorithms are developed, employing a composite theoretical lens made from tools such as intersectionality, ritual theory, intersubjectivity, daemonology, postphenomenology, standpoint epistemology, and more. This theoretical apparatus recontextualizes our understanding of how mythologies and rituals of professionalization, disciplinarity, and dominant epistemological hierarchies animate concepts such as knowledge formation, expertise, and even what counts as knowledge. This recontextualization is then deployed to suggest remedies for research, public policy, and general paths forward in “AI.” By engaging in both the magico-religious valences and the lived experiential expertise of marginalized people, these systems can be better understood, and their harms anticipated and curtailed.

This paper explores the moral, epistemological, and legal implications of multiple different definitions and formulations of human and nonhuman consciousness. Drawing upon research from race, gender, and disability studies, including the phenomenological basis for knowledge and claims to consciousness, I discuss the history of the struggles for personhood among different groups of humans, as well as nonhuman animals, and systems. In exploring the history of personhood struggles, we have a precedent for how engagements and recognition of conscious machines are likely to progress, and, more importantly, a roadmap of pitfalls to avoid. When dealing with questions of consciousness and personhood, we are ultimately dealing with questions of power and oppression as well as knowledge and ontological status—questions which require a situated and relational understanding of the stakeholders involved. To that end, I conclude with a call and outline for how to place nuance, relationality, and contextualization before and above the systematization of rules or tests, in determining or applying labels of consciousness.

This paper explores some history and theories about cyborgs — humans with biotechnological interventions which allow them to regulate their own internal bodily process — and how those compare to the realities of how we treat and consider currently-living people who are physically enmeshed with technology. I’ll explore several ways in which the above-listed considerations have been alternately overlooked and taken up by various theorists, and some of the many different strategies and formulations for integrating these theories into what will likely become everyday concerns in the future. In fact, by exploring responses from disabilities studies scholars and artists who have interrogated and problematized the popular vision of cyborgs, the future, and life in space, I will demonstrate that our clearest path toward the future of living with biotechnologies is a reengagement with the everyday lives of disabled and other marginalized persons, today.

[An expert on the social and cultural implications of technology responds to Aliza Greenblatt’s “If We Ever Make It Through This Alive.”] Aliza Greenblatt’s “If We Make It Through This Alive” is an immediately engaging story, but the deeper in you get, the more is revealed. And one of the starkest but most subtly played revelations comes near the very end, when the audience is confronted with twin harsh truths: Disabled and otherwise marginalized people are least often thought of when planning for the future—and what disabled people know from their experience of living in this world likely makes them better prepared than nondisabled people to survive whatever comes next.

Designers, programmers, and others in the fields of technology and engineering are—recently, and with increasing speed and urgency—coming to understand that there are many ways that human biases and assumptions can create problems within the fields of engineering, programming, algorithmic systems, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and design. In order to understand these assumptions and how they get instantiated in our technological systems, we have to understand various social, psychological, and philosophical frameworks. We must understand how concepts such as intersectionality, embodiment, the extended mind hypothesis, epistemic valuation, and phenomenological experience come together to form the bases for our moral behavior and social interactions. In this paper, I use tools from intersectional feminist theory, feminist epistemology, disability studies, and phenomenology to highlight several questions which represent otherwise discounted categories of knowledge. The audience will come to recognize that each of these questions represents a set of lived experiences and, in some cases, life or death concerns for people in the world, and must be understood and taken into account when designing and deploying technological systems. As long as humans translate their experience and understanding of the world both into technologies and languages that other technologies can understand, humans need to take pains to privilege the perspectives of those traditionally under-served and marginalized groups who understand not only the existence of these questions and their implications, but also the epistemologies and life strategies that they represent. This increased understanding will broaden and deepen our understanding of what our technological systems are and can do, for all of us.

_Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge_ is Ashley Shew’s debut monograph and in it she argues that we need to reassess and possibly even drastically change the way in which we think about and classify the categories of technology, tool use, and construction behavior. Drawing from the fields of anthropology, animal studies, and philosophy of technology and engineering, Shew demonstrates that there are several assumptions made by researchers in all of these fields—assumptions about intelligence, intentionality, creativity and the capacity for novel behavior.

Shannon Vallor’s most recent book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting takes a look at what she calls the “Acute Technosocial Opacity” of the 21st century, a state in which technological, societal, political, and human-definitional changes occur at such a rapid-yet-shallow pace that they block our ability to conceptualize and understand them.[1] Vallor is one of the most publicly engaged technological ethicists of the past several years, and much of her work’s weight comes from its direct engagement with philosophy—both philosophy of technology and various virtue ethical traditions—and the community of technological development and innovation that is Silicon Valley. It’s from this immersive perspective that Vallor begins her work in Virtues.

It is increasingly evident that if researchers and policymakers want to meaningfully develop an understanding of responsible innovation, we must first ask whether some sociotechnical systems should be developed, at all. Here I argue that systems like facial recognition, predictive policing, and biometrics are predicated on myriad human prejudicial biases and assumptions which must be named and interrogated prior to any innovation. Further, the notions of individual responsibility inherent in discussions of technological ethics and fairness overburden marginalized peoples with a demand to prove the reality of their marginalization. Instead, we should focus on equity and justice, valuing the experiential knowledge of marginalized peoples and optimally positioning them to enact deep, lasting change. My position aligns with those in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) which center diverse and situated knowledges, and is articulated together with calls for considering within science and engineering wider sociocultural concerns like justice and equality.

In this brief essay, we discuss the nature of the kinds of conceptual changes which will be necessary to bridge the divide between humanity and machine intelligences. From cultural shifts to biotechnological integration, the project of accepting robotic agents into our lives has not been an easy one, and more changes will be required before the majority of human societies are willing and able to allow for the reality of truly robust machine intelligences operating within our daily lives. Here we discuss a number of the questions, hurdles, challenges, and potential pitfalls to this project, including examples from popular media which will allow us to better grasp the effects of these concepts in the general populace.

This report introduces the activities of eight one-week workshops that were held during the summer of 2017 on the topic “Technology and Consciousness.” Participants in the series of workshops approached the subject from many different perspectives, with the overall goal of exploring the possibility of machine consciousness, and assessing its potential implications. The body of this initial paper summarizes the overview topics and basic introductory themes that were discussed during the early part of the workshop series. Follow-on papers will address the key focus areas that were examined in depth during the course of the full series.

The concept of magic is most often considered as a foil by scholars in the fields of philosophy and religious studies, or it is discussed as part of the investigation of “primitive” systems of belief and ritual. In this essay, magic is investigated as a system of inquiry and explanation unto itself, connected to but distinct from both philosophy and religious studies, and an argument is presented for understanding systems of magic as both natural and rational outgrowths of a particular perspective on reality.

Bots are everywhere. From simple algorithms and aggregator bots to complex “artificially” intelligent machine-learning systems, they have become inescapable. Some are in chat programs. Some are digital assistants, running searches, placing orders, operating the lights, the music, the locks, or anything else in your interconnected space, as with Google Home and the Amazon Echo. Others exist in social networks, running the gamut from aggregators like Appropriate Tributes to conversational learning programs like Microsoft’s disastrous Tay and Zo. Digital actors are making life or death decisions about us every day, determining who gets loans and who pays what level of bail, detecting illnesses and faces in crowds. At their inception, these systems are governed by rules that humans make and which humans should be able to evaluate and adjust, in an effort to make them less biased and more predictive and consistent. But these systems also make rules for themselves — rules that can often be opaque and terrifying, even though they are iterated from the rules we initially gave them. Part of what terrifies us is our sense that bots appear to develop minds of their own, something which calls into question the structure of their “brains” as well as our own.

So, you’re tired of your squishy meatsack of a body, eh? Ready for the next level of sweet biomechanical upgrades? Well, you’re in luck! The world of Futurama has the finest in back-alley and mad-scientist-based bio-augmentation surgeons, ready and waiting to hear from you! From a fresh set of gills, to a brand new chest-harpoon, and beyond, Yuri the Shady Parts Dealer and Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth are here to supply all of your upgrading needs—“You give lungs now; gills be here in two weeks!” Just so long as, whatever you do, stay away from legitimate hospitals. The kinds of procedures you’re looking to get done…well, let’s just say they’re still frowned upon in the 31st century; and why shouldn’t they be? As the woeful tale of Hermes Conrad illustrates, there is a lot at stake— for your mind, your body, and possibly even your very understanding of your self— if you choose to pursue your biomechanical dreams.

By its very nature, Science Fiction media has often concerned itself with advances in human enhancement as well as the creation of various autonomous, thinking, non-human beings. Unfortunately, since the initial proffering of the majority interpretation of Frankenstein, Mary Shelly’s seminal work, and before, most speculative fiction media has taken the standpoint that to enhance or to explore the creation of intelligences, in this way, is doomed to failure, thus recapitulating the myths of Daedalus and of Prometheus and of Lucifer, again and again. What we see and are made to fear are the uprisings of the robots or the artificial neural networks, rather than discussing and respecting the opportunity for a non-human intelligence to arise and demand rights. In this work, I make use of specific films, books, and television shows to explore the philosophical and cultural implications of an alternate interpretation of not only Frankenstein, but of the whole of the field of science fiction. In the first part I argue that it isn’t humanity’s attempts to “play god” that cause our failures, but rather our refusal or inability to pay attention to our circumstances, to take responsibility for our creations, and to learn from the warnings and mistakes of those who went before us. Only with this recognition in mind can we move on to accepting and respecting the fundamental otherness of the intelligences we may either create or cause to be created, all while seeking to bridge that otherness, and come to mutual understanding. As humans have evolved, their concerns have become those of biological creatures with biologically directed needs. Food, shelter, emotional comfort, and stability are needs which would not necessarily occur to an intelligence without the organic component. It would therefore fall to humans to A) Initially recognise the concerns of such an intelligence; B) Countenance and concretise said concerns, in the understanding of other humans; and C) Create a system of interaction through which human concerns were conveyed to these new intelligences, not as primary, but as co-equal. We will do this only by considering that which causes our assumptions and cultural behaviour, namely the stories which we engage, as a culture, and deconstructing both their content and their impact. In all fictional considerations of non-human, and specifically machine intelligence, there is an element of fear of that which we have created. This horror at being “replaced” or “made obsolete” drives us to regard robots and autonomous created intelligences as nothing more than tools to be used, an operational mode which leads to the assumption that machines cannot have rights or even be considered as conscious minds. This assumption begs the question, in the extreme. It is my contention that, with a proper formulation of the rights and responsibilities of and to both human and non-human persons—with consideration for the necessary variance of concerns within different compositions of intelligences—an understanding may be reached wherein our future societies account for not only human needs and development, but those of all intelligences, whatever form they may take.

Religious perspectives, myth, and magic are not merely evocative lenses by which to understand the work done by algorithms and "AI" in the present day- though they are indeed that. And they're not merely the historical underpinnings of the practices of technology in general and the dream of "AI" in particular- though they are that, too. Rather, these elements resonate and recur throughout the past and present practice of "AI" development-and those practices then act as new inputs, foundations, tinting lenses from and through which those systems and artifacts learn. These are ways of living in the world which don't simply exist at the margins or the periphery of our social interactions -rather they're foundational and central to the goals, the aims, the practice of these techno-scientific projects, and especially "AI." Indeed, these religious foundations are crucial to our understanding in a way that is often under-interrogated -not to say uninterrogated. While social scientists and humanities scholars increasingly point to the role belief plays in "AI," social and experiential knowledges are still among the most difficult things to get technoscientific researchers to consider as knowledge at all, much less discuss and account for. Many still feel that values and religious beliefs are and should be separate from technoscientific inquiry. I argue, however, that by engaging in both the magico-religious valences and the lived experiential expertise of marginalized people, "AI" and other technological systems can be better understood, and their harms anticipated and curtailed.