The complex relationship between the current advancement of technology, including the wide scope of settings at which machinery plays substantial roles, and the cultural, historical, and political realities that have long existed across the history of mankind, is one that deserves absolute attention and exploration. This interconnection has been investigated in light of bread, and the meaning it signifies to people from all over the world. Drawing on the commonly unnoticed value of bread, and the everlasting impregnable imprint it has (...) always had on revolutions throughout history, “Collective Bread Diaries” came to being as an interactive art project, employing the artificial intelligence of the MTurk platform in its investigation of “bread” as one’s peculiar voice and political statement. The author amongst other participants was granted the opportunity to draw and share personal visual representations of bread, eventually forming an array of visual diaries, each peculiar to its creator and each reflecting the cultural significance of the place from which it originated. The results are exceptionally reproduced drawings by a machine, with no apparent threads to culture, tradition, or history, emphasizes the conscious perception of one’s distinct identity. A number of 100 distinct drawings were machine-generated featuring various bread types. The process eventually investigates one’s perception of cultural identity, by exploring the cultural, socio-political, and religious threads that have long been weaved into the definition of “bread” across history. (shrink)

Embryo adoption is an act of artificial impregnation. Artificial impregnation is analogous to artificial insemination. The conditions under which artificial impregnation is ethically acceptable may therefore be the same as the conditions under which artificial insemination is ethically acceptable. But artificial insemination is ethically acceptable only when it assists conjugal union to attain its natural purpose. If artificial impregnation is likewise ethically acceptable only insofar as it assists and does not replace conjugal union, (...) then the presence or absence of the conjugal act itself is the fundamental moral criterion by which to judge whether to permit or exclude artificial impregnation. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.1 (Spring 2010): 111–122. (shrink)

It is hardly necessary to rent I Spit on Your Grave or Tool Box Murders for your VCR in order to find images of sexuality contaminated by depersonalization or violence. As far back as Rabelais’ Gargantua, for example, Panurge proposes to build a wall around Paris out of the pleasure-twats of women [which] are much cheaper than stones”: “the largest … in front” would be followed by “the medium-sized, and last of all, the least and smallest,” all interlaced with “many (...) horney joy-dinguses” so that fortification would be impregnable, except for the “ordure and excretions” of the flies it would doubtlessly attract.1 Two centuries later, one of Rabelais’ compatriots, the Marquis de Lade, described the rage of a sexually initiated daughter against a woman who refuses to consider her “pleasure-twat” “cheaper than stones.” The Sadeian heroine first sodomizes her puritanical mother with an artificial penis, then has her infected with syphilis, and finally performs infibulations to prevent the infected semen from leaking out: “Quickly, quickly, fetch me needle and threat! … Spread your thighs, Mama, so I can stitch you together.”2One century later in England, the author of My Secret Life explained that, when in a state of sexual excitement, “he is ready to fuck anything,” from his sister to his grandmother, from a ten-year-old, to a woman of sixty, for a standing prick has no conscience.” To this credo, he adds the admonition, “Woe be to the female whom he gets a chance at, if she does not want him, for he will have her if he can.”3 The sexually aroused man in the contemporary American film Looking for Mr. Goodbar curses the woman who does not want him as much as she wants a room of her own and the freedom to choose a succession of male lovers. After he resentfully determines to have her when he gets the chance , he rapes her and finally knifes her to death, exclaiming “That’s what you want, bitch, right? That’s what you want.”However these individual works are labeled, such passages remind us of the long history of pornography, a gender-specific genre produced primarily by and for men but focused obsessively on the female figure. In their depictions of female sexuality, narratives from Gargantua to La Philosophie dans le boudoir, My Secret Life, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar explain why definitions of the pornographic have recently moved away from “obscenity,” a term that generally refers to the sexually stimulating effects of a picture, a novel, or a film on the male reader/observer, and toward “dehumanization,” a word that is used to evoke the objectification of women. As Irene Diamond has demonstrated, during the past decade the generally held assumption that pornography is about male sexuality has been qualified by those who argue that “the ‘what’ of pornography is not sex but power and violence, and the ‘who’ of concern are no longer male consumers and artists but women.”4 1. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Jacques Le Clercq , bk. 2, chap. 15. I have used this translation because it is employed in Helene Iswolsky’s translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World . With no analysis of gender, Bakhtin’s exclusive focus on the grotesque wipes out the significance of Rabelais’ sexual imagery.2. Marquis de Sade, quoted in a brilliant reading of this text by Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography , p. 127; all further references to this work , abbreviated SW, will be included in the text.3. My Secret Life , p. 361.4. Irene Diamond, “Pornography and Repression: A Reconsideration,” in Women: Sex and Sexuality, ed. Catharine Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person , p. 132. Susan Gubar is professor of English and women’s studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert, she has coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and co-edited both Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets and the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. This fall they will publish the first volume of a three-volume work, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is “ ‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity”. (shrink)

One of the most common contemporary approaches for developing an ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) involves elaborating guiding principles. This essay explores the limitations of this approach, using the history of bioethics as a comparative case. The examples of bioethics and recent AI ethics suggest that principles are difficult to implement in everyday practice, fail to direct individual action, and can frequently result in a pure proceduralism. The essay encourages an additional attention to virtue, which forms the dispositions of (...) actors, directs them to valued ends, and encourages right action in particular situation to complement principles. Practices and professions like medicine or warfighting that already have rich traditions of reflection on virtue ethics will be especially fruitful fields for developing an AI ethics of virtue. (shrink)

Clinical decisions are expected to be based on factual evidence and official values derived from healthcare law and soft laws such as regulations and guidelines. But sometimes personal values instead influence clinical decisions. One way in which personal values may influence medical decision-making is by their affecting factual claims or assumptions made by healthcare providers. Such influence, which we call ‘value-impregnation,’ may be concealed to all concerned stakeholders. We suggest as a hypothesis that healthcare providers’ decision making is sometimes affected (...) by value-impregnated factual claims or assumptions. If such claims influence e.g. doctor–patient encounters, this will likely have a negative impact on the provision of correct information to patients and on patients’ influence on decision making regarding their own care. In this paper, we explore the idea that value-impregnated factual claims influence healthcare decisions through a series of medical examples. We suggest that more research is needed to further examine whether healthcare staff’s personal values influence clinical decision-making. (shrink)

This essay introduces this special issue on virtue ethics in relation to military AI. It describes the current situation of military AI ethics as following that of AI ethics in general, caught between consequentialism and deontology. Virtue ethics serves as an alternative that can address some of the weaknesses of these dominant forms of ethics. The essay describes how the articles in the issue exemplify the value of virtue-related approaches for these questions, before ending with thoughts for further research.

Slippery-slope arguments typically question a course of action by estimating that it will end in misery once the first unfortunate step is taken. Previous studies indicate that estimations of the long-term consequences of certain debated actions, such as legalizing physician-assisted suicide, may be strongly influenced by tacit personal values. In this paper, we suggest that to the extent that slippery-slope arguments rest on estimations of future events, they may be mere rationalizations of personal values. This might explain why there are (...) proponents even for strikingly poor slippery-slope arguments. (shrink)

Wagman examines the emulation of human cognition by artificial intelligence systems. The book provides detailed examples of artificial intelligence programs (such as the FERMI System and KEKADA program) accomplishing highly intellectual tasks.

In this paper an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model was used to help cars dealers recognize the many characteristics of cars, including manufacturers, their location and classification of cars according to several categories including: Make, Model, Type, Origin, DriveTrain, MSRP, Invoice, EngineSize, Cylinders, Horsepower, MPG_Highway, Weight, Wheelbase, Length. ANN was used in prediction of the number of miles per gallon when the car is driven in the city(MPG_City). The results showed that ANN model was able to predict MPG_City with (...) 97.50 % accuracy. The factor of DriveTrain has the most influence on MPG_City evaluation. Similar studies can be carried out for the evaluation of other characteristics of cars. (shrink)

Presupposing no familiarity with the technical concepts of either philosophy or computing, this clear introduction reviews the progress made in AI since the inception of the field in 1956. Copeland goes on to analyze what those working in AI must achieve before they can claim to have built a thinking machine and appraises their prospects of succeeding. There are clear introductions to connectionism and to the language of thought hypothesis which weave together material from philosophy, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. (...) John Searle's attacks on AI and cognitive science are countered and close attention is given to foundational issues, including the nature of computation, Turing Machines, the Church-Turing Thesis and the difference between classical symbol processing and parallel distributed processing. The book also explores the possibility of machines having free will and consciousness and concludes with a discussion of in what sense the human brain may be a computer. (shrink)

In October 2016, the White House, the European Parliament, and the UK House of Commons each issued a report outlining their visions on how to prepare society for the widespread use of artificial intelligence. In this article, we provide a comparative assessment of these three reports in order to facilitate the design of policies favourable to the development of a ‘good AI society’. To do so, we examine how each report addresses the following three topics: the development of a (...) ‘good AI society’; the role and responsibility of the government, the private sector, and the research community in pursuing such a development; and where the recommendations to support such a development may be in need of improvement. Our analysis concludes that the reports address adequately various ethical, social, and economic topics, but come short of providing an overarching political vision and long-term strategy for the development of a ‘good AI society’. In order to contribute to fill this gap, in the conclusion we suggest a two-pronged approach. (shrink)

. A comparison is made between two unlikely debates over intelligence. One debate took place in 1550 at Valladolid, Spain, between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepúlveda over the intelligence of the Amerindian. The other debate is contemporary, between John Searle and various representatives of the “strong” artificial intelligence community over the adequacy of the Turing test for intelligence. Although the contemporary debate has yet to die down, the Valladolid debate has been over for four hundred (...) years. The question asked here is whether the contemporary debate can profit from the previous one. The common bond providing the basis for contrast is the issue of the “other” which is present in both debates. From this contrast, the observation is made that the question of meaning is intimately tied to the question of intelligence. (shrink)

En la era del Antropoceno y en el contexto de la Cuarta Revolución Industrial, la inteligencia artificial representa un elemento que profundiza los problemas relacionados con la degradación ambiental. En este sentido, figuras destacadas como Aimee van Wynsberghe y Mark Coeckelbergh han comenzado a plantear el concepto de inteligencia artificial sostenible (IAS). Sin embargo, es importante conectar esta propuesta conceptual con un modelo de innovación que permita su realización en aras de la sostenibilidad. La quíntuple hélice constituye una (...) oportunidad para el impulso de la IAS a través de una innovación comprometida con la participación social y el cuidado ambiental. (shrink)

For an artificial agent to be morally praiseworthy, its rules for behaviour and the mechanisms for supplying those rules must not be supplied entirely by external humans. Such systems are a substantial departure from current technologies and theory, and are a low prospect. With foreseeable technologies, an artificial agent will carry zero responsibility for its behavior and humans will retain full responsibility.

1. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? One of the fascinating aspects of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is that the precise nature of its subject ..

The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence for making decisions in public affairs has sparked a lively debate on the benefits and potential harms of self-learning technologies, ranging from the hopes of fully informed and objectively taken decisions to fear for the destruction of mankind. To prevent the negative outcomes and to achieve accountable systems, many have argued that we need to open up the “black box” of AI decision-making and make it more transparent. Whereas this debate has primarily focused (...) on how transparency can secure high-quality, fair, and reliable decisions, far less attention has been devoted to the role of transparency when it comes to how the general public come to perceive AI decision-making as legitimate and worthy of acceptance. Since relying on coercion is not only normatively problematic but also costly and highly inefficient, perceived legitimacy is fundamental to the democratic system. This paper discusses how transparency in and about AI decision-making can affect the public’s perception of the legitimacy of decisions and decision-makers and produce a framework for analyzing these questions. We argue that a limited form of transparency that focuses on providing justifications for decisions has the potential to provide sufficient ground for perceived legitimacy without producing the harms full transparency would bring. (shrink)

When is it ethically acceptable to use artificial agents in health care? This article articulates some criteria for good care and then discusses whether machines as artificial agents that take over care tasks meet these criteria. Particular attention is paid to intuitions about the meaning of ‘care’, ‘agency’, and ‘taking over’, but also to the care process as a labour process in a modern organizational and financial-economic context. It is argued that while there is in principle no objection (...) to using machines in medicine and health care, the idea of them functioning and appearing as ‘artificial agents’ is problematic and attends us to problems in human care which were already present before visions of machine care entered the stage. It is recommended that the discussion about care machines be connected to a broader discussion about the impact of technology on human relations in the context of modernity. (shrink)

The enduring innovations in artificial intelligence and robotics offer the promised capacity of computer consciousness, sentience and rationality. The development of these advanced technologies have been considered to merit rights, however these can only be ascribed in the context of commensurate responsibilities and duties. This represents the discernable next-step for evolution in this field. Addressing these needs requires attention to the philosophical perspectives of moral responsibility for artificial intelligence and robotics. A contrast to the moral status of animals (...) may be considered. At a practical level, the attainment of responsibilities by artificial intelligence and robots can benefit from the established responsibilities and duties of human society, as their subsistence exists within this domain. These responsibilities can be further interpreted and crystalized through legal principles, many of which have been conserved from ancient Roman law. The ultimate and unified goal of stipulating these responsibilities resides through the advancement of mankind and the enduring preservation of the core tenets of humanity. (shrink)

Some of the systems used in natural language generation (NLG), a branch of applied computational linguistics, have the capacity to create or assemble somewhat original messages adapted to new contexts. In this paper, taking Bernard Williams’ account of assertion by machines as a starting point, I argue that NLG systems meet the criteria for being speech actants to a substantial degree. They are capable of authoring original messages, and can even simulate illocutionary force and speaker meaning. Background intelligence embedded in (...) their datasets enhances these speech capacities. Although there is an open question about who is ultimately responsible for their speech, if anybody, we can settle this question by using the notion of proxy speech, in which responsibility for artificial speech acts is assigned legally or conventionally to an entity separate from the speech actant. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method examines the remarkable advances made in the field of AI over the past twenty years, discussing their profound implications for philosophy. Taking a clear, non-technical approach, Donald Gillies shows how current views on scientific method are challenged by this recent research, and suggests a new framework for the study of logic. Finally, he draws on work by such seminal thinkers as Bacon, Gdel, Popper, Penrose, and Lucas, to address the hotly-contested question of whether computers (...) might become intellectually superior to human beings. (shrink)

In the field of machine consciousness, it has been argued that in order to build human-like conscious machines, we must first have a computational model of qualia. To this end, some have proposed a framework that supports qualia in machines by implementing a model with three computational areas (i.e., the subconceptual, conceptual, and linguistic areas). These abstract mechanisms purportedly enable the assessment of artificial qualia. However, several critics of the machine consciousness project dispute this possibility. For instance, Searle, in (...) his Chinese room objection, argues that however sophisticated a computational system is, it can never exhibit intentionality; thus, would also fail to exhibit consciousness or any of its varieties. This paper argues that the proposed architecture mentioned above answers the problem posed by Searle, at least in part. Specifically, it argues that we could reformulate Searle’s worries in the Chinese room in terms of the three-stage artificial qualia model. And by doing so, we could see that the person doing all the translations in the room could realize the three areas in the proposed framework. Consequently, this demonstrates the actualization of self-consciousness in machines. (shrink)

In the present study, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated a group of participants on a grammaticality classification task after they had been exposed to well-formed consonant strings generated from an artificial regular grammar. We used an implicit acquisition paradigm in which the participants were exposed to positive examples. The objective of this studywas to investigate whether brain regions related to language processing overlap with the brain regions activated by the grammaticality classification task used in the present (...) study. Recent meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies indicate that syntactic processing is related to the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann's areas 44 and 45) or Broca's region. In the present study, we observed that artificial grammaticality violations activated Broca's region in all participants. This observation lends some support to the suggestions that artificial grammar learning represents a model for investigating aspects of language learning in infants [TICS 4 (2000) 178] and adults [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of United States of America 99 (2002) 529]. (shrink)

En On the Origin of Species Darwin distingue explícitamente entre tres tipos de selección: la selección natural, la artificial y la sexual. En este trabajo, a partir de un estudio más sistemático que historiográfico, se intenta encontrar la relación entre estos tres tipos de selección en la obra de Darwin. Si bien la distinción entre estos distintos mecanismos es de suma importancia en la obra de Darwin, la tesis de este trabajo es que tanto la selección artificial como (...) la sexual no son mecanismos distintos de la selección natural. Particularmente se sostiene que la selección artificial y la sexual son casos de la natural, y por esto sirven para su contrastación. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology provides a principled approach to embedding common values in to AI systems both early and throughout the design process. To do so, it draws on an important case study: the evidence and final report of the UK Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence. This empirical investigation shows that the different and often disparate stakeholder groups that are implicated in AI design and use share some common values that can be used (...) to further strengthen design coordination efforts. VSD is shown to be both able to distill these common values as well as provide a framework for stakeholder coordination. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence is at a turning point, with a substantial increase in projects aiming to implement sophisticated forms of human intelligence in machines. This research attempts to model specific forms of intelligence through brute-force search heuristics and also reproduce features of human perception and cognition, including emotions. Such goals have implications for artificial consciousness, with some arguing that it will be achievable once we overcome short-term engineering challenges. We believe, however, that phenomenal consciousness cannot be implemented in machines. (...) This becomes clear when considering emotions and examining the dissociation between consciousness and attention in humans. While we may be able to program ethical behavior based on rules and machine learning, we will never be able to reproduce emotions or empathy by programming such control systems—these will be merely simulations. Arguments in favor of this claim include considerations about evolution, the neuropsychological aspects of emotions, and the dissociation between attention and consciousness found in humans. Ultimately, we are far from achieving artificial consciousness. (shrink)

Analogously to Kuhn’s and Hanson’s understanding of observation as theory-impregnated, we try to test the hypothesis that observation and interpretation might also be value-impregnated. We use a written examination task for medical students who were asked to read and interpret a text where the authors provide arguments pro et contra euthanasia. Afterwards the students were asked to provide their own reflected opinion on the issue. We found that medical students who were against and indecisive provided interpretations of the text which (...) accorded with their own reflected opinions (P = 0.02), indicating that their interpretations were influenced by their own values. When including those who were pro euthanasia, the association was no longer significant. Although the present investigation was a small pilot-study, we obtained partial support for our hypothesis and have adjusted it to read as follows: observations and interpretations might be value-impregnated for respondents who have rather strong value-based attitudes. We think the adjusted hypothesis deserves to be further examined. (shrink)

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) can be characterized as the investigation of computational systems that exhibit intelligent behavior (including algorithms and models used in these systems). The emphasis is not so much on understanding (human) cognitive processes as on producing models, algorithms, and systems that are capable of apparently intelligent behavior by whatever means available. The idea of AI has had a long history that can be traced all the way back to, for example, Leibniz. The idea was (...) furthered through the development, early in this century, of mathematical logic, cybernetics, and information theory, all of which contributed to AI theorizing. Alan Turing's bold claim that machines can think, advanced in his famous 1950 paper, and the “Turing test” he proposed therein as a means to test the intelligence of machines predated and prompted the formation of AI. Six years later, the Dartmouth conference in 1956, the participants of which included Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy, inaugurated AI as an academic discipline. This contemporary version of AI was facilitated by the invention and rapidly widening use of digital computers. AI embodies an extremely diverse set of ideas that are often mutually conflicting (as in the case of symbolism versus connectionism), and its relationship with other fields studying cognition (such as psychology and linguistics) has been a close but uneasy one. (shrink)

As systems based on opaque Artificial Intelligence (AI) continue to flourish in diverse real-world applications, understanding these black box models has become paramount. In response, Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged as a field of research with practical and ethical benefits across various domains. This paper not only highlights the advancements in XAI and its application in real-world scenarios but also addresses the ongoing challenges within XAI, emphasizing the need for broader perspectives and collaborative efforts. We bring together experts from (...) diverse fields to identify open problems, striving to synchronize research agendas and accelerate XAI in practical applications. By fostering collaborative discussion and interdisciplinary cooperation, we aim to propel XAI forward, contributing to its continued success. Our goal is to put forward a comprehensive proposal for advancing XAI. To achieve this goal, we present a manifesto of 27 open problems categorized into nine categories. These challenges encapsulate the complexities and nuances of XAI and offer a road map for future research. For each problem, we provide promising research directions in the hope of harnessing the collective intelligence of interested stakeholders. (shrink)

Does the assumption of a weak form of computational functionalism, according to which the right form of neural computation is sufficient for consciousness, entail that a digital computational simulation of such neural computations is conscious? Or must this computational simulation be implemented in the right way, in order to replicate consciousness? From the perspective of Karl Friston’s free energy principle, self-organising systems (such as living organisms) share a set of properties that could be realised in artificial systems, but are (...) not instantiated by computers with a classical (von Neumann) architecture. I argue that at least one of these properties, viz. a certain kind of causal flow, can be used to draw a distinction between systems that merely simulate, and those that actually replicate consciousness. (shrink)

In this article, we study the mural restoration work based on artificial intelligence-assisted multiscale trace generation. Firstly, we convert the fresco images to colour space to obtain the luminance and chromaticity component images; then we process each component image to enhance the edges of the exfoliated region using high and low hat operations; then we construct a multistructure morphological filter to smooth the noise of the image. Finally, the fused mask image is fused with the original mural to obtain (...) the final calibration result. The fresco is converted to HSV colour space, and chromaticity, saturation, and luminance features are introduced; then the confidence term and data term are used to determine the priority of shedding boundary points; then a new block matching criterion is defined, and the best matching block is obtained to replace the block to be repaired based on the structural similarity between the block to be repaired and the matching block by global search; finally, the restoration result is converted to RGB colour space to obtain the final restoration result. An improved generative adversarial network structure is proposed to address the shortcomings of the existing network structure in mural defect restoration, and the effectiveness of the improved modules of the network is verified. Compared with the existing mural restoration algorithms on the test data experimentally verified, the peak signal-to-noise ratio score is improved by 4% and the structural similarity score is improved by 2%. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) based clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are becoming ever more widespread in healthcare and could play an important role in diagnostic and treatment processes. For this reason, AI‐based CDSS has an impact on the doctor–patient relationship, shaping their decisions with its suggestions. We may be on the verge of a paradigm shift, where the doctor–patient relationship is no longer a dual relationship, but a triad. This paper analyses the role of AI‐based CDSS for shared decision‐making to (...) better comprehend its promises and associated ethical issues. Moreover, it investigates how certain AI implementations may instead foster the inappropriate paradigm of paternalism. Understanding how AI relates to doctors and influences doctor–patient communication is essential to promote more ethical medical practice. Both doctors' and patients' autonomy need to be considered in the light of AI. (shrink)

: Artificial intelligences and robots increasingly mimic human mental powers and intelligent behaviour. However, many authors claim that ascribing human mental powers to them is both conceptually mistaken and morally dangerous. This article defends the view that artificial intelligences can have human-like mental powers, by claiming that both human and artificial minds can be seen as extended minds – along the lines of Chalmers and Clark’s view of mind and cognition. The main idea of this article is (...) that the Extended Mind Model is independently plausible and can easily be extended to artificial intelligences, providing a solid base for concluding that artificial intelligences possess minds. This may warrant viewing them as morally responsible agents. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Mind; Moral Responsibility; Extended Cognition Intelligenze artificiali come menti estese. Perché no? Riassunto: Intelligenze artificiali e robot simulano in misura sempre crescente le capacità mentali e i comportamenti intelligenti umani. Molti autori, tuttavia, sostengono che attribuire loro capacità mentali umane sia concettualmente errato e moralmente pericoloso. In questo lavoro si difende l’idea per cui le intelligenze artificiali possano avere capacità mentali simili a quelle umane, sostenendo che menti umane e artificiali possano essere considerate come menti estese – sulla scorta della prospettiva di Chalmers e Clark circa la mente e la cognizione. L’idea principale alla base di questo lavoro è che il Modello della Mente Estesa abbia plausibilità a prescindere e che possa essere facilmente esteso alle intelligenze artificiali, fornendo una base solida per concludere che le intelligenze artificiali possiedano delle menti e si possano considerare come agenti moralmente responsabili. Parole chiave: Intelligenza artificiale; Mente; Responsabilità morale; Conoscenza estesa. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence research and regulation seek to balance the benefits of innovation against any potential harms and disruption. However, one unintended consequence of the recent surge in AI research is the potential re-orientation of AI technologies to facilitate criminal acts, term in this article AI-Crime. AIC is theoretically feasible thanks to published experiments in automating fraud targeted at social media users, as well as demonstrations of AI-driven manipulation of simulated markets. However, because AIC is still a relatively young and (...) inherently interdisciplinary area—spanning socio-legal studies to formal science—there is little certainty of what an AIC future might look like. This article offers the first systematic, interdisciplinary literature analysis of the foreseeable threats of AIC, providing ethicists, policy-makers, and law enforcement organisations with a synthesis of the current problems, and a possible solution space. (shrink)

Reports of the successful creation of artificial life usually garner considerable interest from philosophers. This paper argues that the worries philosophers have about artificial life do not, for the most part, depend on the artificiality of a given organism. In particular advances in synthetic biology will make the distinction between artificial and natural life a difficult and fluid one. Philosophers should hence refrain from making their arguments depend on a distinction between artificial and natural life.

In 2017 and 2019, two research teams claimed ‘proof of principle’ for artificial womb technology (AWT). AWT has long been a subject of speculation in bioethical literature, with broad consensus that it is a welcome development. Despite this, little attention is afforded to more immediate ethical problems in the development of AWT, particularly as an alternative to neonatal intensive care. To start this conversation, I consider whether experimental AWT is innovative treatment or medical research. The research–treatment distinction, pervasive in (...) regulation worldwide, is intended to isolate research activities and subject them to a greater degree of oversight. I argue that there is a tendency in the literature to conceptualize AWT for partial ectogenesis as innovative treatment. However, there are sufficiently serious ethical concerns with experimental AWT that mean that it must not be first used on humans on the basis that it is a ‘beneficial treatment’. First, I outline the prospects for translation of AWT animal studies into treatment for human preterms. Second, I challenge the conceptualizations of experimental AWT as innovative treatment. It must be considered medical research to reflect the investigatory nature of the process and guarantee sufficient protections for subjects. Identifying that AWT is research is crucial in formulating further ethico‐legal questions regarding the experimental use of AWT. Third, I demonstrate that clinical trials will be a necessary part of the clinical translation of AWT because of requirements laid out by regulators. I consider the justification for clinical trials and highlight some of the crucial ethical questions about the conditions under which they should proceed. (shrink)

Bioethics scholarship considering the possibility of gestating an embryo to full term in an artificial womb (ectogenesis) often overstates the capacities of current technologies and underestimates the barriers to the development of full ectogenesis. Moreover, this debate causes harm by (1) neglecting more immediate problems in the development of artificial wombs, (2) treating abortion as a “problem with a technological solution,” bolstering anti-abortion rhetoric, and (3) presuming the stability of women’s reproductive rights. The ectogenesis conversation must consider anticipated (...) uses of the technology (neonatal intensive care) and acknowledge the immediate context (recognizing abortion as essential healthcare and existing reproductive inequities). (shrink)