Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability of machines to take decisions as intelligent agents. AI now controls parts of our lives through AI-based services, gadgets and software. Unlike other technologies which merely comply to human instructions, AI has the ability to actively make decisions like a human. With this unprecedent ability of agency, AI faces the same ethical questions as...
The integration of social and ethical responsibility aspects in artificial intelligence (AI) innovation processes is a considerable challenge for AI start-up firms. This paper presents a method (or modular assessment toolbox) for recognising, supporting and maintaining firm-level efforts to innovate by taking some possibly hidden or unwanted social implications into account. The tool was...
While privacy notices are becoming ever more prevalent on our phones and online, it is well-accepted that they are not sufficient to manage our data privacy. In Part I, I briefly outline the current challenges data privacy notices face, ranging from dark patterns, information overload, and the privacy paradox. I then suggest that we move away from notice-and-consent and take a value-centered...
Autonomy algorithms are a technology, first proposed in 2018, to determine what a patient incapable of autonomous choice would decide for his or her medical treatment, if he or she were capable. The algorithm would mine electronic health records, demographic information, and social media content, to predict a patient’s preference. The prediction could inform clinicians’ decision making in...
With the prospect of fully autonomous driving (AD) on the horizon, adequate political answers to normative challenges of AD become increasingly pressing. Some of these challenges concern the AI based automated decision-making processes essential for the function of AD: It is as of yet unclear which set of normative criteria should be used to guide the decision-making processes of an autonomous...
The development of AI algorithms is rapidly increasing in the field of medicine. Especially within image-based medicine, machine learning algorithms seem to be able to reach high levels of accuracy in performing medical tasks. This is often seen as an adequate indicator of these systems’ potency to support or even replace medical experts in their professional tasks. However, the accuracy...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to a collection of computational technologies which make decisions semi-autonomously by learning from patterns obtained from pre-existing data. Since a major part of human actions which produces economic value are tied to constrained intelligent decision making, the economic consequences of AI are non-trivial. Over the last decade this potential of AI for...
Today, due to growing computing power and the increasing availability of comprehensive, high-quality datasets, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly entering many areas of our everyday life. Thereby, however, a number of significant ethical concerns arise, including issues of fairness, privacy and human autonomy, which so far have been addressed mainly through the...
On the background of two contrasting case studies from contemporary Artificial Intelligence, this paper mounts a qualified defence of epistemic opacity in computer modelling and simulation. If epistemic transparency is understood as analytic tractability or the ‘ability to decompose the process between model inputs and outputs into modular steps’ (Humphreys 2004), situations of analytical...
Facial beauty prediction (FBP) aims to develop a machine that automatically makes facial attractiveness assessment. In the past those results were highly correlated with human ratings, therefore also with their bias in annotating.
As artificial intelligence can have racist and discriminatory tendencies, the cause of skews in the data must be identified. Development of training data and AI...
In this paper, we analyzed the ethical and social aspects of AI systems from the developers’ perspectives on data privacy, transparency, and accountability. To contextualize our inquiries, we wanted to understand the current ethics state of AI startups in Turkey from the developers’ perspectives to deep dive into their technical oriented worlds. In order to get their points of view, we have...
Health apps aim to promote their users’ health by tracking health related data, and by influencing their users to act in a healthier manner. They might thus be considered to be “persuasive technol-ogies”, which raises concerns about how they might affect their users’ autonomy. Some argue that such health apps in fact promote their users’ autonomy, by better allowing them to pursue their...
With the development and implementation of algorithm driven decision-making procedures based on aggregated data collected from individual users, several moral challenges arise. In this paper, we explore the connection between voluntarily sharing or selling your data on the one hand, and the dangers of automated decision-making based on big data and artificial intelligence on the other. We call...
In considering issues related to AI, ethicists and the public have tended to focus on the artificial nature of AI, differences between AI and humans. However, scientists have made progress in the development of AI by making programs more human, conceiving of intelligence in terms of the capacity to learn. As a result, ethicists should reconsider issues in terms of similarities between humans...
What are the epistemic justifications that warrant computer vision artificial intelligence (AI) to make inferences about \textit{personality} based on portrait images? Are such justifications supported by reasons that refer to the epistemic soundness of the inferences themselves or the practical advantages that such inferences may have for the parties involved (or both)? In this paper, we...
Much attention has been paid to exploring how AI techniques could improve our moral behavior. Even though it might be in principle impossible to suppose that any AI system could do our moral thinking for us, there is still a substantial role that AI mentors could play in our moral education and training. In particular, an AI Socratic interlocutor might offer considerable improvements to...
Questions of regulation are intricately tied to questions of autonomy and personhood. In this paper, while exploring the philosophical foundations of AI regulation, I argue that if Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered to be morally autonomous then the search for regulation would lead us towards the existing regulation of natural persons and formulation of ‘reasonable algorithm’ standard....
Theories of action tend to require agents to have mental representations. A common trope in discussions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is that they don’t, and so cannot be agents. Properly understood there may be something to the requirement, but the trope is badly misguided. Here we provide an account of representation for AI that is sufficient to underwrite attributions to these systems of...
There are different views on the morally relevant capacities of robots. While some regard robots to be basically advanced forms of computers, others consider them rather to be agent to which we can ascribe responsibility, that we should treat with respect and ascribe rights to them. In this paper we investigate the moral status of robots with two methodological tools. In a first step, we will...
Synthetic intelligence—in addition to the properties of reasoning, ethical thinking, judgment, and other characteristics of the human mind—will also exhibit a propensity for mental illness or mental disorder. Mental disorder can be understood here as a sort of malfunction in a synthetic mind or brain. It is obviously a natural feature of the human mind, so it is inherent in the brain’s design....
Gender bias is frequently understood as an ethical deficit of humans whereas machines are considered neutral and unbiased. Today we know that technologies can be biased in at least three ways (Bath 2009; 2014; Michelfelder et al. 2017): they duplicate biased social norms, ignore physical-biological traits, or impose cognitive norms. AI has entered our lives with the promise of acting in a fair...
I show that recent developments in AI technology (especially in Machine Learning in combination with Big Data) and its role in Surveillance Capitalism are not a direct, but only an indirect threat to democracy. Based on Lawrence Lessig’s “Code is Law,” I draw a more elaborated picture of regulation and argue that AI is subsisting on an empty shell of democracy while threatening the rule of...
