Edmund Terem Ugar

In this paper, we examine the evolving conception of the “other” in relation to human happiness, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical account and empirical findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Ricoeur situates happiness in three interrelated threads: individual fulfilment, friendship with those near to us, and just relations with distant others. The Harvard Study corroborates the significance of relationality for well-being, showing that strong social ties enhance longevity and life satisfaction. However, contemporary digitalisation and the proliferation of AI humanoid social robots challenge traditional notions of the “other.” Individuals increasingly form “meaningful” attachments, emotional bonds, and even romantic relationships with technological artefacts, raising the question of whether these non-human entities can contribute to happiness in a Ricoeurian sense. While the above dynamics are now proliferating, we argue that AI and social robots cannot be considered as the “other” in the Ricoeurian sense. Although these technologies can be considered as a virtual other, we do not defend that position in the current paper. In this paper, we explore the tensions regarding the authenticity, moral status, and ethical implications of AI and social robots in relation to human happiness. We conclude by proposing a re-evaluation of relationality, moral consideration, and the ethical frameworks underpinning human–technology interactions in the pursuit of human flourishing and happiness in the Ricoeurian sense.

Should artificial intelligence/machine ethicists be concerned with the singularity/ intelligent explosion (the view that superintelligent technologies will emerge in the future) and their potential harms, or should they channel their ethical ounce on mitigating the current ethical challenges of machine learning, such as algorithmic bias and discrimination? I argue that the discussion on the intelligent explosion/ technological singularity/super intelligence is a futuristic hype that distracts ethicist from addressing the pressing and immediate problems that come with current designs of AI, especially machine learning technologies. This article underscores that AI ethicists must resist the utopian futuristic hype of conceiving these machines as potential human-like agents with goals to pursue. Rather, the aforementioned ethicists must focus on innovating new approaches to fully mitigate real-time ethical bumps of these technologies, such as bias and discrimination. As I will show in this article, the current utopic hype of these technologies is not feasible in the near future. Thus, it is counter-productive for AI ethicists to channel all their ethical arsenals into ensuring the responsible design of utopic technologies. Rather, these ethical arsenals should be used innovatively to ensure responsible designs of current technologies in the current social milieu to mitigate current problems like bias and discrimination that are embedded in these technologies.

There have been deliberate mob attacks allegedly led by the anti-immigrant activist group Operation Dudula, which led to the death of Elvis Nyathi, a Zimbabwean citizen, in South Africa. These attacks prove the loss of important Ubuntu ethical values, such as interpersonal relationships characterised by identity and solidarity, a value recurrent to the people of sub- Saharan Africa. This paper contributes to the discourse on intra-African migration by suggesting practical ways to achieve effective migration and peaceful coexistence of African migrants within the African continent. I use the experiences of migrants in South Africa as a referent. I submit that the xenophobic attacks in South Africa, specifically targeting black people of African descent, are one of many issues that indicate the current loss of Ubuntu values, such as interpersonal relationships of identity and solidarity within African consciousness. As a result, this and other issues threaten intra-African migration. I conclude by providing prescriptive measures to strengthen the aforementioned values and enable a peaceful coexistence between migrants and South Africans.

Machine learning technologies deployed in several sub-Saharan African countries to assist medical practitioners have shown how such technologies can significantly extend the reach of limited medical personnel and equipment resources. However, while I praise the efficiency of these technologies in carrying out medical diagnosis and treatment recommendations, I raise some critical concerns about the normative shift that may occur in their usage in the region. An uncritical use or overreliance on these technologies may threaten shared decision-making between patients and doctors. While shared decision-making is an integral component of patient-centred care in contemporary medicine that must be respected, from a phenomenological perspective, the stakes are higher for sub-Saharan Africans. For Africans, the threat to shared decision-making may negatively impact a significant aspect of the community–interpersonal relationships. I contend that over-relying on these systems for clinical diagnosis and recommendations may diminish the value of interpersonal relationships between patients and doctors. I show how the practice of interpersonal relationships is integral in making a moral agent (to becoming a member of the moral community) within the sub-Saharan African value systems. Finally, this paper seeks to make novel contributions to value-sensitive healthcare/healthcare technology policies, guidelines and regulations within sub-Saharan Africa and countries in the global South that share similar ethical/cultural worldviews.

This commentary aims to respond to some criticism against our paper entitled ‘Designing AI for Mental Health Diagnosis: Challenges from sub-Saharan value-laden Judgments on Mental Health Disorders’.1 While we are sympathetic to the invaluable critiques of some authors, we show that some misunderstanding arises in reading our conceptualisation of the condition we use as a central example of disease in our paper. We argue, in our paper, that there are obvious context-specific value judgments when it comes to mental health disorders, which obscures an application of generic machine learning (ML) in the diagnosis of these conditions. To contextualise our contention, our understanding of mental health disorder is grounded in Jerome Wakefield’s2 hybrid theorisation of disease as that which encompasses aspects of the normativist and naturalist accounts of health. Wakefield theorises that facts are necessary but insufficient to make a condition a disease. Wakefield claims that a disorder requires harm that involves values. Thus, values and facts must go concomitantly for a condition to be considered a disorder. Here, a disorder is conceived as something that is a ‘harmful dysfunction’. On the one hand, harmful is value laden—characterised by how a society conceives the notion due to their set norms. On the contrary, dysfunction is a solely scientific term due to a failure to function in accordance with the reference class of an organism. …

Recently clinicians have become more reliant on technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for effective and accurate diagnosis and prognosis of diseases, especially mental health disorders. These remarks, however, apply primarily to Europe, the USA, China and other technologically developed nations. Africa is yet to leverage the potential applications of AI and ML within the medical space. Sub-Saharan African countries are currently disadvantaged economically and infrastructure-wise. Yet precisely, these circumstances create significant opportunities for the deployment of medical AI, which has already been deployed in some places in the continent. However, while AI and ML have come with enormous promises in Africa, there are still challenges when it comes to successfully applying AI and ML designed elsewhere within the African context, especially in diagnosing mental health disorders. We argue, in this paper, that there ought not to be a homogeneous/generic design of AI and ML used in diagnosing mental health disorders. Our claim is grounded on the premise that mental health disorders cannot be diagnosed solely on ‘factual evidence’ but on both factual evidence and value-laden judgements of what constitutes mental health disorders in sub-Saharan Africa. For ML to play a successful role in diagnosing mental health disorders in sub-Saharan African medical spaces, with a precise focus on South Africa, we allude that it ought to understand what sub-Saharan Africans consider as mental health disorders, that is, the value-laden judgements of some conditions.

_ Memory and Forgetting in the Digital Age _ is a descriptive subtitle of the book, _Remember Me_ by the Italian theoretical philosopher Davide Sisto. The book’s central aim is to provide a philosophical argument on the consequences of digital networks such as social media and the internet in the way we remember and forget. Sisto does not subscribe to the well-known conception of memory and forgetting as opposites. He considers memory and forgetting to be the same thing; they have the same properties and are indistinguishable This is because remembering is forgetting, and forgetting is remembering. Memory does not pose the assumption that the past can be recalled totally but tries to fictionalise the past. The past begins to fade and deviate, and this deviation requires the act of forgetting. However, the proliferation of technologies and the internet has changed how we conceptualise forgetting and memory. The internet has provided the past with the opportunity to emancipate itself from the present and autonomously own itself and set its own trajectory. The past no longer sits in a space to be forgotten but now has the power to influence and shape the present.

Remote work, understood here as a working environment different from the traditional office working space, is a phenomenon that has existed for many years. In the past, workers voluntarily opted, when they were allowed to, to work remotely rather than commuting to their traditional work environment. However, with the emergence of the global pandemic (corona virus-COVID-19), people were forced to work remotely to mitigate the spread of the virus. Consequently, researchers have identified some benefits and adverse effects of remote work, especially in the age of COVID-19, ranging from flexible time and environment to technostress and isolation. In this paper, using a phenomenological approach, specifically, the sub-Saharan African experiences, I contend that remote work in the age of advanced technologies has obscured the value of relationality due to the problem of isolation in sub-Saharan African workplaces. For sub-Saharan Africans, relationality is a prerequisite moral value to becoming a person. In addition, relationality contributes to meaningfulness in the workspace. Obscuring the value of relationality in the aforementioned locale leads to meaninglessness in the workspace. Furthermore, this paper contributes to the existing literature on meaningful work by critically showing the importance of the value of relationality as a key element that adds meaning to work in sub-Saharan Africa.

Techno-colonialism, which I argue here to specifically mean the transfer of technology and its values and norms from one locale to another, has become a serious concern with the advancement of socially disruptive technologies1 of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), like artificial intelligence and robots. While the transfer of technology from one locale, especially economically advanced countries, to developing countries comes with economic benefits for both regions, it is important to understand that technologies are not value- neutral; they come with the values, cultures, and worldviews of their designers. However, despite the nonvalue-neutrality of the technologies of the 4IR, they are still relevant for subSaharan Africa’s development. Thus, using a phenomenological approach, especially the sub-Saharan African experiences of past histories of colonialism, I prescribe cautionary measures that sub-Saharan Africans ought to take in approaching the current industrial revolution and its technologies.

Sex robots, in a broad ethical sense, challenge our traditional social norms, sexual interactions, and how we visualise the human body. As a distinct sex stimulation technology, sex robots are ethically problematic because of the humanlike characteristics that these technologies embody. In this paper, I argue, on the one hand, that the design of sex robots objectifies the human body, from an African perspective, because of their humanoid appearance. This objectification of the human body contradicts the African conception of the human body as possessing inalienable dignity, vitality, and sacredness. On the other hand, I show how the designs of sex robots reinforce adverse stereotypical gender norms and standards of beauty. This paper is significant because it deploys sub-Saharan African values of sex and the human body to make a novel contribution to the ethical discourse of sex robots.