Techné / Society for Philosophy & Technology (SPT)

Techné's publisher (the PDC) has made back issues of Techné freely available. Any volume over three years old is now accessible for free (as well as more recent articles where authors have paid for open access): pdcnet.org/techne/free

In early December, I’ll be hitting New Zealand for a three city tour in support of my new book! Catch me giving talks in Wellington, Dunedin, or Auckland where I’ll be ruthlessly breaking down the political economy of AI. Register below 👇

2025 SPT (Society for Philosophy and Technology) conference at my previous department at @TUeindhoven & @4TUethics : spt2025.dryfta.com Deadline for abstracts 15.01.25 please rt

Computer scientist: "We can program ethics into AI to generate benefits and avoid risks." Me: "We need to face risks to develop as human beings." CS: "What's a better way to program ethics into AI?" Me: "There's no better way. Trying to delegate ethics to AI is itself unethical."

AI tools in healthcare "hallucinating" patient conversation. h/t @Wolven for this article,... and warning about this for a good 10+ years. apnews.com/article/ai-art…

See @ruha9 on "AI’s insidious inputs—the eugenic values and logics of those who create these systems, cloaking them in the rhetoric of salvation." lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ne…

Scientific racism in AI search results isn't surpring at all if you've been paying attention to STSers and philosophers of technology critiquing some of these systems. wired.com/story/google-m…

"there's something especially pernicious about text generators in academia, where writing is not merely an output but a means of thinking, crediting, arguing, structuring thoughts. Hollowing out these skills carries foundational risks" @DingemanseMark tinyurl.com/44samxwe

I'm pleased to announce the publication of a new paper on the computational hermeneutics of emotions I co-authored with @SemanticBoy and Antonin Shnyder, now available in open-access @HSScomms nature.com/articles/s4159….

Call for Editors - METASCIENCE. The primary journal reviewing books in History & Philosophy of Science is looking for new Editors in Chief Metascience publishes book reviews in History and Philosophy of Science, and Science and Technology Studies.

Our essay of the week argues that the unchecked optimism surrounding AI aligns with eugenicist logic, creating systems that favor a small privileged group while harming marginalized populations. By @ruha9 in @LAReviewofBooks buff.ly/3YxZtda

🚨 [AI RESEARCH] The paper "The Ethics of AI in Health Care: An Updated Mapping Review" by @jessRmorley & @Floridi is GREAT for understanding ethical issues in AI-powered healthcare. 3 core ethical concerns everybody should be familiar with: 1️⃣  Epistemic concerns: inconclusive, inscrutable, and misguided evidence "(...) Just because an AI model can recognize a pattern, does not automatically make the pattern meaningful nor the action it informs clinically efficacious or safe. In brief, AI models trained on poor-quality data can produce inaccurate or discriminatory outputs that may lead to patient fatalities (...); models that are initially well-trained and properly validated may introduce patient safety risks post-deployment due to the negative effects of dataset drift or even data poisoning (...); and large language models may regurgitate or hallucinate harmful misinformation (...)" 2️⃣ Normative concerns: unfair outcomes and transformative effects "(...) normative ethical concerns focus on how the integration of AI into healthcare systems might fundamentally alter the nature of care delivery. Specifically, by focusing on how the implementation of AI may reconfigure relationships between different parts of the healthcare ecosystem, normative ethical implications stress AI’s potential to (a) change how health and illness are conceptualized, categorized, and managed (...); (b) reshape the embodied and affective experiences of both patients and clinicians; (c) reinforce social inequalities (...); and (d) erode trust in human healthcare professionals (...)" 3️⃣ Concerns related to traceability "The preceding discussion of the normative ethical risks associated with the increasing use of AI in healthcare highlighted how AI has the potential to transform the delivery of healthcare fundamentally. At the core of this transformation process, is the development of a far more complex network consisting of humans and non-human agents. The complexity of this resultant network makes responsibility attribution difficult because a fault, that may result in a patient safety issue, may have multiple different causes that are hard to trace (...). This is concerning because, according to Felder (2021), the transparent organization of responsibility in a healthcare system serves at least two purposes: (a) to incentivize healthcare providers to act ethically in all circumstances; and (b) to ensure the foundation of patient trust in the reliability of healthcare providers is sufficiently solid for healthcare to flourish. (...)" ➡️ Read the paper below. 🏛️ STAY UP TO DATE. AI governance is moving fast: join 37,000+ people in 150+ countries who subscribe to my newsletter on AI policy, compliance & regulation, including outstanding research papers (link below).

Ugh. What does “critical” mean in the context of AI?? It has to be more than “asking questions”, right? I want folk to consider rejecting AI, not simply accommodating its least objectionable tendencies. This is not a subtweet.

@David_Gunkel @mitpress Congrats!

So very pleased that my book "Person, Thing, Robot" is part of the direct to open (D2O) program at @mitpress Community over Commercialization - #OAWeek24 bit.ly/Gunkel-PTR

@ethicistforhire @TechneSPT We had an event based on similarly ambiguous, troubled attitude to AI and we complied a bibliography that your students may be interested in: aianxiety.odie.us

Had a meeting with our grad students today to discuss possible thesis topics and many students seem angry about AI and unclear how to channel that anger because they see "AI ethics" as part of the problem not part of the solution...

RIP Moor. If you know your ethics of computational methods, you must have read/taught some of his work. The man was doing everything from AI ethics, machine ethics, algorithmic ethics, etc. way before it was cool/necessary. dailynous.com/2024/10/15/jam…

"Many companies will soon have AI ethics boards (if they don’t already), but in my experience, they often lack real power. It’s time to change that. These boards should have the authority to veto AI deployments that don’t meet ethical standards" #AIEthics fastcompany.com/91190245/ai-en…