Rachel S. Robertson

The exponential growth in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the past few years has seen important new considerations in economics, global politics, communication, data analysis and more. Many great promises are in store for those who master this technology, but so too are many potential disasters. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Asia, the most populous continent where national strategies since 2017 have focused on the importance of AI for establishing the stability and prosperity of the region. On 16 and 17 October 2024, the Centre for Applied Ethics at Hong Kong Baptist University, in collaboration with the Dicastery for Culture and Education, held a conference to discuss particular social and ethical challenges facing Asia with AI. Scholars gathered from across the continent and even beyond to bring to light and collaborate on what issues we uniquely face. We offer this piece to highlight problems and potential responses.

This article provides an account of the ethical issues that arise when digital technologies and online spaces are structured by Big Data algorithms. We show that although the uses of Big Data may be new, traditional theological and ethical categories are still applicable, including “the sins of the fathers” from hamartiology and the scholastic concept of haecceity. Using these resources, we map the overall ecosystem in which digital technologies are developed and used, identifying the relationships between the individuals and organizations involved. We show how these relationships are often characterized by various kinds of harm. We then argue for a reorientation of the tech ecosystem toward co‐liberation—and ultimately, joy.

In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant claims that perception of force through touch is fundamental to our knowledge of substance in space. However, he also holds that perception cannot have modal content. Causation is a modal notion, so how can Kant allow perception of causal force? In response to this puzzle, I provide a new reading of Kant’s theory of touch. Touch does not involve perception of the necessity of a cause, but it does involve awareness of the activity of our body in relation to other bodies. Human embodied activity has a hitherto unrecognized central role in Kant’s accounts of empirical cognition of substance in space, the science of such a substance, and the irreducibility of its causal forces.