•  5924
    Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing, warned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could one day pose an existential risk to humanity. Today, recent advancements in the field AI have been accompanied by a renewed set of existential warnings. But what exactly constitutes an existential risk? And how exactly does AI pose such a threat? In this chapter we aim to answer these questions. In particular, we will critically explore three commonly cited reasons for thinking that AI poses an existenti…Read more
  •  2070
    Technological advances are bringing new light to privacy issues and changing the reasons for why privacy is important. These advances have changed not only the kind of personal data that is available to be collected, but also how that personal data can be used by those who have access to it. We are particularly concerned with how information about personal attributes inferred from collected data (such as online behaviour), can be used to tailor messages and services to specific individuals or gr…Read more
  •  1353
    Supporting human autonomy in AI systems
    with Rafael Calvo, Dorian Peters, and Richard M. Ryan
    In Christopher Burr & Luciano Floridi (eds.), Ethics of digital well-being: a multidisciplinary approach, Springer. 2020.
    Autonomy has been central to moral and political philosophy for millenia, and has been positioned as a critical aspect of both justice and wellbeing. Research in psychology supports this position, providing empirical evidence that autonomy is critical to motivation, personal growth and psychological wellness. Responsible AI will require an understanding of, and ability to effectively design for, human autonomy (rather than just machine autonomy) if it is to genuinely benefit humanity. Yet the ef…Read more
  •  774
    The extended mind thesis maintains that the functional contributions of tools and artefacts can become so essential for our cognition that they can be constitutive parts of our minds. In other words, our tools can be on a par with our brains: our minds and cognitive processes can literally ‘extend’ into the tools. Several extended mind theorists have argued that this ‘extended’ view of the mind offers unique insights into how we understand, assess, and treat certain cognitive conditions. In this…Read more
  •  583
    Humans and AI systems are usually portrayed as separate sys- tems that we need to align in values and goals. However, there is a great deal of AI technology found in non-autonomous systems that are used as cognitive tools by humans. Under the extended mind thesis, the functional contributions of these tools become as essential to our cognition as our brains. But AI can take cognitive extension towards totally new capabil- ities, posing new philosophical, ethical and technical chal- lenges. To an…Read more
  •  492
    The Motivations and Risks of Machine Ethics
    with Stephen Cave, Rune Nyrup, and Adrian Weller
    Proceedings of the IEEE 107 (3): 562-574. 2019.
    Many authors have proposed constraining the behaviour of intelligent systems with ‘machine ethics’ to ensure positive social outcomes from the development of such systems. This paper critically analyses the prospects for machine ethics, identifying several inherent limitations. While machine ethics may increase the probability of ethical behaviour in some situations, it cannot guarantee it due to the nature of ethics, the computational limitations of computational agents and the complexity of th…Read more
  •  453
    Vehicle externalism maintains that the vehicles of our mental representations can be located outside of the head, that is, they need not be instantiated by neurons located inside the brain of the cogniser. But some disagree, insisting that ‘non-derived’, or ‘original’, content is the mark of the cognitive and that only biologically instantiated representational vehicles can have non-derived content, while the contents of all extra-neural representational vehicles are derived and thus lie outside…Read more
  •  391
    The Parity Argument for Extended Consciousness
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (3-4): 16-33. 2015.
    Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) argue that certain mental states and processes can be partially constituted by objects located beyond one’s brain and body: this is their extended mind thesis (EM). But they maintain that consciousness relies on processing that is too high in speed and bandwidth to be realized outside the body (see Chalmers, 2008, and Clark, 2009). I evaluate Clark’s and Chalmers’ reason for denying that consciousness extends while still supporting unconscious state extension…Read more
  •  270
    The extended mind thesis maintains that while minds may be centrally located in one’s brain-and-body, they are sometimes partly constituted by tools in our environment. Critics argue that we have no reason to move from the claim that cognition is embedded in the environment to the stronger claim that cognition can be constituted by the environment. I will argue that there are normative reasons, both scientific and ethical, for preferring the extended account of the mind to the rival embedded acc…Read more
  •  121
    Your smartphone is much more than just a phone. It can tell a more intimate story about you than your best friend. No other piece of hardware in history, not even your brain, contains the quality or quantity of information held on your phone: it ‘knows’ whom you speak to, when you speak to them, what you said, where you have been, your purchases, photos, biometric data, even your notes to yourself – and all this dating back years. In this piece I ask whether, given the role they play in our live…Read more
  •  96
    Responsible AI: Two Frameworks for Ethical Design and Practice
    with Dorian Peters, Diana Robinson, and Rafael Calvo
    IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society 1 (1). 2020.
    In 2019, the IEEE launched the P7000 standards projects intended to address ethical issues in the design of autonomous and intelligent systems. This move came amidst a growing public concern over the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence (AI), compounded by the lack of an anticipatory process for attending to ethical impact within professional practice. However, the difficulty in moving from principles to practice presents a significant challenge to the implementation of ethical gui…Read more
  •  83
    Can Consciousness Extend?
    Philosophical Topics 48 (1): 243-264. 2020.
    The extended mind thesis prompted philosophers to think about the different shapes our minds can take as they reach beyond our brains and stretch into new technologies. Some of us rely heavily on the environment to scaffold our cognition, reorganizing our homes into rich cognitive niches, for example, or using our smartphones as swiss-army knives for cognition. But the thesis also prompts us to think about other varieties of minds and the unique forms they take. What are we to make of the exotic…Read more
  •  74
    The Facets of Artificial Intelligence: A Framework to Track the Evolution of AI
    with Fernando Martínez-Plumed, Bao Sheng Loe, Peter Flach, Sean O. O. HEigeartaigh, and José Hernández-Orallo
    In Fernando Martínez-Plumed, Bao Sheng Loe, Peter Flach, Sean O. O. HEigeartaigh, Karina Vold & José Hernández-Orallo (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Evolution of the contours of AI, . pp. 5180-5187. 2018.
    We present nine facets for the analysis of the past and future evolution of AI. Each facet has also a set of edges that can summarise different trends and contours in AI. With them, we first conduct a quantitative analysis using the information from two decades of AAAI/IJCAI conferences and around 50 years of documents from AI topics, an official database from the AAAI, illustrated by several plots. We then perform a qualitative analysis using the facets and edges, locating AI systems in the int…Read more
  •  49
    Believing in Black Boxes: Must Machine Learning in Healthcare be Explainable to be Evidence-Based?
    with Liam McCoy, Connor Brenna, Stacy Chen, and Sunit Das
    Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. forthcoming.
    Objective: To examine the role of explainability in machine learning for healthcare (MLHC), and its necessity and significance with respect to effective and ethical MLHC application. Study Design and Setting: This commentary engages with the growing and dynamic corpus of literature on the use of MLHC and artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine, which provide the context for a focused narrative review of arguments presented in favour of and opposition to explainability in MLHC. Results: We find…Read more
  •  48
    The extended mind thesis maintains that while minds may be centrally located in one?s brain-and-body, they are sometimes partly constituted by tools in our environment. Critics argue that we have no reason to move from the claim that cognition is embedded in the environment to the stronger claim that cognition can be constituted by the environment. I will argue that there are normative reasons, both scientific and ethical, for preferring the extended account of the mind to the rival embedded acc…Read more
  •  38
    The Limits of Machine Intelligence
    with Henry Shevlin, Matthew Crosby, and Marta Halina
    EMBO Reports 49177 (20). 2019.
    Despite there being little consensus on what intelligence is or how to measure it, the media and the public have become increasingly preoccupied with the concept owing to recent accomplishments in machine learning and research on artificial intelligence (AI). Governments and corporations are investing billions of dollars to fund researchers who are keen to produce an ever‐expanding range of artificial intelligent systems. More than 30 countries have announced such research initiatives over the p…Read more