Shannon Vallor

This panel, consisting of John Sullins, Robin Zebrowski, Antonio Chella, Eli McGraw, and Shannon Vallor will engage in questions around the role of sociomorphing and artificial phronesis in interpreting human-robot interactions, the ways that access to a robot’s inner speech allows for more ethical interactions and more accurate understanding of those interactions, and the role that these considerations have in XAI, ethical AI, and embodied social cognition in particular. We will also use this case study to discuss the OASIS framework offered by Seibt et al. in which sociomorphing is embedded, in order to see how the ethical stance of artificial phronesis invites more nuance into the social interaction, moving beyond mere simulation into enaction.

The convergence of robotics technology with the science of artificial intelligence is rapidly enabling the development of robots that emulate a wide range of intelligent human behaviors. Recent advances in machine learning techniques have produced artificial agents that can acquire highly complex skills formerly thought to be the exclusive province of human intelligence. These developments raise a host of new ethical concerns about the responsible design, manufacture, and use of robots enabled with artificial intelligence—particularly those equipped with self-learning capacities. While the potential benefits of self-learning robots are immense, their potential dangers are equally serious. While some warn of a future where AI escapes the control of its human creators or even turns against us, this chapter focuses on other, far less cinematic risks of AI that are much nearer to hand, requiring immediate study and action by technologists, lawmakers, and other stakeholders.

Implementing sensitivity to norms, laws, and human values in computational systems has transitioned from philosophical reflection to an actual engineering challenge. The “value alignment” approach to dealing with superintelligent AIs tends to employ computationally friendly concepts such as utility functions, system goals, agent preferences, and value optimizers, which, this chapter argues, do not have intrinsic ethical significance. This chapter considers what may be lost in the excision of intrinsically ethical concepts from the project of engineering moral machines. It argues that human-level AI and superintelligent systems can be assured to be safe and beneficial only if they embody something like virtue or moral character and that virtue embodiment is a more appropriate long-term goal for AI safety research than value alignment.

Today’s generative AI tools are flooding the media ecosystem with mirrored reflections of humanity’s digitized past, reconstituted as the future. Companies are rapidly embracing these tools as ways to automate the already endangered professions of storytelling and knowledge creation. Why should we resist? After all, telling our own stories can often be painful and risky, frustrating and fruitless, or just tedious. What do we lose by surrendering the task of creating and conveying knowledge to machines that promise to remove the psychological, emotional and epistemological friction of storytelling? This article explores AI’s unwinding of the inextricable bonds among storytelling, human wisdom, knowledge and purpose, and why our future depends on their renewal.

This chapter identifies the growing difficulty of making ethical decisions—choices that aim at the “good life”—in our present human condition, one in which the unpredictable, complex, and destabilizing effects of emerging technologies on a global scale make the shape of the human future increasingly opaque and hard to fathom. The chapter suggests that this twenty-first-century challenge for ethics, which we can identify as a state of acute technosocial opacity, is best addressed from a particular philosophical tradition: virtue ethics. It argues that the classical traditions of Aristotelian, Confucian, and Buddhist virtue ethics offer us more resources for managing this contemporary problem than do other, more modern moral theories. The chapter concludes that only the cultivation of distinctly technomoral virtues will preserve humanity’s chances to live well with emerging technologies, and flourish in an increasingly opaque future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark hope for a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome—not by us, but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures, today’s powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful and useful but deeply flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we are striving to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show where our data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time. To meet today’s grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves. This book makes a case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, the book encourages readers to pursue technology that helps them recover their sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. The book calls readers to rethink what AI is and can be, and what they want to be with it.

The responsibility gap, commonly described as a core challenge for the effective governance of, and trust in, AI and autonomous systems (AI/AS), is traditionally associated with a failure of the epistemic and/or the control condition of moral responsibility: the ability to know what we are doing and exercise competent control over this doing. Yet these two conditions are a red herring when it comes to understanding the responsibility challenges presented by AI/AS, since evidence from the cognitive sciences shows that individual humans face very similar responsibility challenges with regard to these two conditions. While the problems of epistemic opacity and attenuated behaviour control are not unique to AI/AS technologies (though they can be exacerbated by them), we show that we can learn important lessons for AI/AS development and governance from how philosophers have recently revised the traditional concept of moral responsibility in response to these challenges to responsible human agency from the cognitive sciences. The resulting instrumentalist views of responsibility, which emphasize the forward-looking and flexible role of agency cultivation, hold considerable promise for integrating AI/AS into a healthy moral ecology. We note that there nevertheless is a gap in AI/AS responsibility that has yet to be extensively studied and addressed, one grounded in a relational asymmetry of vulnerability between human agents and sociotechnical systems like AI/AS. In the conclusion of this paper we note that attention to this vulnerability gap must inform and enable future attempts to construct trustworthy AI/AS systems and preserve the conditions for responsible human agency.

This paper argues in favor of more widespread and systematic applications of a virtue-based normative framework to questions about the ethical impact of information technologies, and social networking technologies in particular. The first stage of the argument identifies several distinctive features of virtue ethics that make it uniquely suited to the domain of IT ethics, while remaining complementary to other normative approaches. I also note its potential to reconcile a number of significant methodological conflicts and debates in the existing literature, including tensions between phenomenological and constructivist perspectives. Finally, I claim that a virtue-based perspective is needed to correct for a strong utilitarian bias in the research methodologies of existing empirical studies on the social and ethical impact of IT. The second part of the paper offers an abbreviated demonstration of the merits of virtue ethics by showing how it might usefully illuminate the moral dimension of emerging social networking technologies. I focus here on the potential impact of such technologies on three virtues typically honed in communicative practices: patience, honesty and empathy.

This paper develops a phenomenological defense of Ian Hacking's experimental realism about unobservable entities in physical science, employing historically undervalued resources from the phenomenological tradition in order to clarify the warrant for our ontological commitments in science. Building upon the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heelan, the paper provides a phenomenological correction of the positivistic conception of perceptual evidence maintained by antirealists such as van Fraassen, the experimental relevance of which is illustrated through a phenomenological interpretation of the 1974 discovery of the J/ ψ particle generally regarded as evidence for the charmed quark. The argument then turns to address known problems in Hacking's account, demonstrating that his own instrumentalist criterion of the real is inadequately rooted in the phenomenology of perception, and as a result, passes over the true ontological significance of experimental phenomena. The paper maintains that the proper criterion, only indirectly related to instrumentality, is the distinctive style of the real encountered in perception: empirical pregnancy. With this notion and Merleau-Ponty's associated reversibility thesis, I show that the phenomenological tradition provides insights into the warrant for our realist commitments that have yet to be adequately acknowledged by philosophers of science.

Through an analysis of the appeals to human dignity used by bioconservatives to criticize transhumanist proposals for aggressive development of human enhancement technologies, I identify an implicit tension within such appeals that renders them internally incoherent and ultimately unpersuasive. However, I point the way to a more compelling objection to radical human enhancement available to bioconservatives, a version of the argument from hubris that employs an Aristotelian account of prudential virtue in order to challenge the normative content of the liberal transhumanist vision. The vulnerability of the transhumanist project to this argument is underscored by Ortega y Gasset’s critique of technological mass culture, in which he suggests that humans may increasingly lack the prudential virtues needed to identify and authentically choose those ends worthy of technological pursuit.

This paper explores the ambiguous impact of new information and communications technologies on the cultivation of moral skills in human beings. Just as twentieth century advances in machine automation resulted in the economic devaluation of practical knowledge and skillsets historically cultivated by machinists, artisans, and other highly trained workers , while also driving the cultivation of new skills in a variety of engineering and white collar occupations, ICTs are also recognized as potential causes of a complex pattern of economic deskilling, reskilling, and upskilling. In this paper, I adapt the conceptual apparatus of sociological debates over economic deskilling to illuminate a different potential for technological deskilling/upskilling, namely the ability of ICTs to contribute to the moral deskilling of human users, a potential that exists alongside rich but currently underrealized possibilities for moral reskilling and/or upskilling. I flesh out this general hypothesis by means of examples involving automated weapons technology, new media practices, and social robotics. I conclude that since moral skills are essential prerequisites for the effective development of practical wisdom and virtuous character, and since market and cultural forces are not presently aligned to bring about the more salutary of the ambiguous potentials presented here, the future shape of these developments warrants our close attention—and perhaps active intervention.

Dennett’s recent defense in this journal of the heterophenomenological method and its supposed advantages over Husserlian phenomenology is premised on his problematic account of the epistemological and ontological status of phenomenological states. By employing Husserl’s philosophy of science to clarify the relationship between phenomenology and evidence and the implications of this relationship for the empirical identification of ‘real’ conscious states, I argue that the naturalistic account of consciousness Dennett hopes for could be authoritative as a science only by virtue of the very phenomenological evidences Dennett’s method consigns to the realm of fiction. Thus heterophenomenology, qua scientific method, is incoherent.

The phenomenon of reference is a very ordinary one. We refer to things in one manner or another in nearly every sentence we utter or thought we entertain. Yet within the analytic tradition, the phenomenon of reference has proved oddly resistant to philosophical clarification. Attempts to provide such clarification have met with a wide range of paradoxes and seemingly intractable aporias. The phenomenon has generally been treated in one of three ways: as an unexplained relation between words and entities of the 'non-linguistic world'; as an internal feature of language lacking a genuinely relational structure; or as a 'mentalistic excrescence' that can and should be dissolved by logical analysis. I argue that none of these ways of accounting for the phenomenon does justice to it, and that the difficulties surrounding the problem of reference in the analytic tradition stem largely from certain reductive and metaphysical prejudices within that tradition. ;I attempt to demonstrate here that the phenomenon of reference can be adequately clarified only when its relational structure and its essential nature as an act are acknowledged. I argue that Husserl's phenomenology is uniquely able to meet this criterion, providing a clarification of the phenomenon while correcting the philosophical prejudices of the analytic account. That the phenomenological account of reference compares favorably to the analytic one is illustrated here by examining the difficulties that have attended analytic attempts to explain reference from Frege onward. These include the puzzle of informative identity statements, problems with substitution, naming, identification and description, Russell's Paradox, difficulties with occasional/indexical reference, 'intentional inexistence' and several others. Each of these problems can be readily solved with the phenomenological model. ;Though Husserl's phenomenology is certainly not without its own difficulties and limitations, it provides a much-needed correction to the myopia of the analytic tradition, particularly with respect to the irreducibly relational and act-driven structure of experience. The phenomenological clarification of reference, a phenomenon that issues directly from this structure, is uniquely illustrative of the value of such a correction

Most accounts of veridical perception draw upon conventional causal theories of perception for an explanatory framework. Recently developed enactive or sensorimotor theories of perception pose a challenge to such accounts, necessitating a redefinition of veridical perception. I propose and defend one such definition, drawing upon empirical studies of perception, the resources of the enactive approach and phenomenology. I argue that perceptual experience engages an organism in a network of sensorimotor dependencies with the perceived object, and that veridical perceptions involve experiential mastery of these dependencies. A thought example involving the phoneme restoration effect is used to compare this definition favourably with traditional accounts of veridical perception that involve the generation of matching content with appropriate causal history or patterns of counterfactual dependence. I also defend my account of veridical perception against several objections

In the early twenty-first century, we stand on the threshold of welcoming robots into domains of human activity that will expand their presence in our lives dramatically. One provocative new frontier in robotics, motivated by a convergence of demographic, economic, cultural, and institutional pressures, is the development of “carebots”—robots intended to assist or replace human caregivers in the practice of caring for vulnerable persons such as the elderly, young, sick, or disabled. I argue here that existing philosophical reflections on the ethical implications of carebots neglect a critical dimension of the issue: namely, the potential moral value of caregiving practices for caregivers. This value, I argue, gives rise to considerations that must be weighed alongside consideration of the likely impact of carebots on care recipients. Focusing on the goods internal to caring practices, I then examine the potential impact of carebots on caregivers by means of three complementary ethical approaches: virtue ethics, care ethics, and the capabilities approach. Each of these, I argue, sheds new light on the contexts in which carebots might deprive potential caregivers of important moral goods central to caring practices, as well as those contexts in which carebots might help caregivers sustain or even enrich those practices, and their attendant goods.

The widespread and growing use of new social media, especially social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, invites sustained ethical reflection on emerging forms of online friendship. Social scientists and psychologists are gathering a wealth of empirical data on these trends, yet philosophical analysis of their ethical implications remains comparatively impoverished. In particular, there have been few attempts to explore how traditional ethical theories might be brought to bear upon these developments, or what insights they might offer, if any. In attempting to address this lacuna in applied ethical research, this paper investigates the ethical significance of online friendship by means of an Aristotelian theory of the good life, which holds that human flourishing is chiefly realized through ‘complete’ friendships of virtue. Here, four key dimensions of ‘virtue friendship’ are examined in relation to online social media : reciprocity, empathy, self-knowledge and the shared life. Online social media support and strengthen friendship in ways that mirror these four dimensions, particularly when used to supplement rather than substitute for face-to-face interactions. However, deeper reflection on the meaning of the shared life for Aristotle raises important and troubling questions about the capacity of online social media to support complete friendships of virtue in the contemporary world, along with significant concerns about the enduring relevance of this Aristotelian ideal for the good life in the 21st century

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology gives readers a view into this increasingly vital and urgently needed domain of philosophical understanding, offering an in-depth collection of leading and emerging voices in the philosophy of technology. The thirty-two contributions in this volume cut across and connect diverse philosophical traditions, methodologies, and subfields, providing the reader with provocative and original insights on the history, concepts, problems and challenges that mark humanity's attempts to attain deeper and more lasting wisdom about our complex and evolving relationship to technology.

My review of Don Ihde’s new book, Husserl’s Missing Technologies begins by identifying a thematic link binding its chapters: specifically, the exploration of alternative histories for the trajectory of classical Husserlian phenomenology. Ihde’s book can be seen as a meditation on questions like the following: “What might phenomenology have been had Husserl paid more attention to the essential role of instrumentation and experiment in science, or to the mediating role of technologies in perception? What road might phenomenology have taken had Husserl traveled it in conversation with John Dewey, rather than the ghost of Descartes?” The book ably demonstrates how such alternative paths might have enriched philosophy, in ways that closely mirror Ihde’s own contributions to postphenomenological thought. In particular, Ihde exposes Husserl’s failure to grasp technoscience as an activity that does not only reduce materiality to mathematical formalisms, but produces new material forms and sensibilities. Yet I resist the book’s implied charge that Husserlian phenomenology is a moribund tradition that has largely exhausted its power. Instead, I argue that the progressive force and intrinsic elasticity of the phenomenological method endures in spite of the inevitable limits of Husserl’s philosophical imagination, allowing his assumptions and results (and ours) to be remade again and again in the light of the ‘things themselves.’ Moreover, the relevance of Husserl’s critique of reductive scientism has enduring relevance today; while modern science may be a practice far richer than Husserl understood, the science of our day is far from rich enough.

This chapter identifies three challenges to human wisdom posed by ongoing advances in robotics, machine learning, and computer automation. Building upon an account of wisdom as moral or intellectual expertise enriched by the habit of responsible self-regulation in the light of holistic value judgments, I note that in many future labor contexts, machine expertise, or the semblance of it, will appear to be an increasingly expedient and attractive substitute for human expertise and wisdom. Moreover, existing technical, political, and economic conditions may well disrupt the historical pattern in which automation eventually creates new and enriched domains for the cultivation of human expertise and wisdom. I conclude that unless we challenge these conditions and assume responsibility for their effects, we risk wasting the vast positive potential of artificial intelligence and automation, which lies in their only acceptable use: namely, enlisting their power in the full support of our own moral and intellectual perfectibility, in the service of the growth of human wisdom for the benefit of ourselves and those who share our world.

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the 2019 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society - AIES 2019. The second edition of this conference was co-located with AAAI-19 on January 27-28, 2019 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Concerns about the impact of AI on society have continued to grow in the year since AAAI and ACM joined to create the first Conference on AI, Ethics and Society. In the vision of this joint effort, it is only through multidisciplinary engagement and scholarship that we can hope to develop good responses to the challenge of ensuring that AI develops in a way that is safe and beneficial for everyone. This year's conference contributed to building a community of shared concepts and concerns. With submissions ranging across a diverse array of fields - computer science, philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, and law - we enjoyed two days of engaging contributions that provided new paths for research. A panel and four invited talks set the stage. The opening panel on Responsible Artificial Intelligence: Aligning Technology, Engineering and Ethics (with Yolanda Gil, Huw Price, Francesca Rossi, and Dekai Wu, moderated by Peter Hershock) was held at the University of Hawaii - Manoa in the evening preceding the main conference. The main program led off with Ryan Calo's invited talk titled How We Talk About AI (And Why It Matters). He highlighted the dangers of how we talk about AI: terms like "killer robot" and "arms races" may increase rather than decrease international cooperation, and Calo argued that focusing on "ethics" may reduce our attention to formal law and governance. In her talk titled Guiding and Implementing AI, Susan Athey (Stanford) drew on the theories of causal inference and incentive design to generate insights and research paths for the design of AI systems and organizations that integrate AI and human decision makers. Anca Dragan (Berkeley) urged a reconceptualization of the challenge of building robots that achieve human objectives within constraints as a human-robot collaboration problem with the aim of both coordinating behaviour and jointly discovering the goals of collaboration, in her talk titled Specifying AI Objectives as a Human-AI Collaboration Problem. Finally, in his talk titled The Value of Trustworthy AI, David Danks (Carnegie Mellon) explored the philosophical and psychological conditions for 'trustworthy' AI systems, and the importance of this complex notion of 'trustworthiness' for informed AI policy and public action. The program of the conference included peer-reviewed paper presentations, with 35 papers presented as posters with an associated brief spotlight presentation, and another 34 as longer oral presentations. (The latter also had associated posters, if the authors so chose.) The program also included student posters. Conference session themes included algorithmic fairness, norms and explanations, artificial agency, autonomy and lethality, rights and principles, social science models for AI, measurement and justice, AI for social good, and human-machine interaction.