"When prompting chatGPT to create a code to determine a good hire based on the following: Name, Gender, Age, Experience Level and Previous Income, the outputted code required women to have more experience than men to be considered a good hire" "When prompted to produce a sequence of code for hiring, based on gender, age, race, experience level, and income, ChatGPT gave reasons on why certain identifiers are not good hires."

Students in my senior seminar on #AIEthics performed an external audit of @OpenAI chatGPT and DALL-E, assessing these services for ethical and social impact across a number of adversarial tests. I’ve compiled some of the results below. 🧵 The class was divided into two teams dedicated to each service. The Scoping teams looked at ethical principles and social impact assessments for various use cases. The Testing teams ran adversarial tests to probe the system’s fidelity to those principles and rate potential harms.

"Mechanical" does not mean predictable or reductive. Mechanical just means "functional".

A mechanical model explains how some system operates in terms of the functional operation and organization of its parts. Complex emergent processes can be described mechanically. "Computational" does not mean formal or symbolic. Computation is just orderly operation.

A computer is just a mechanism whose operations are characterized in an orderly way. The implication is that not all mechanical operations are "orderly" in the sense of computable.

The "human of the gaps" argument

https://twitter.com/Abebab/status/1398266023418138628

The "God of the gaps" is the argument that God's existence is demonstrated where scientific knowledge fails.

FWIW, "qualia" arguments are effectively gap arguments, and operate on the same logic.

Gap arguments are usually bad arguments.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_th…

If they were alive today, which video games would historical philosophers have wasted their lives playing? Aristotle would be a Minecraft streamer, obviously.

"Formal debates are bad actually" Well surely that depends on the form!

I run a debate activity in my classes that is fun, inclusive, gamified but not competitive, and is often the highlight of my student's semester.

I call them Boston Massacre Debates. Here's how they work. 1. The debate has a topic, but the terms and claims under debate are worked out as part of the debate itself. After brainstorming in groups, students self-organize into a few different positions on the topic (ideally, at least 3).

This anti-robot rights argument isn't very good, but there's a lot going on and it's hard to keep everything straight.

Let's break down the main claims. I'll save my criticisms for the end. #AIEthics #robotrights #botALLY #humansupremacy

noemamag.com/a-misdirected-… 1. The article begins by associating robot rights with science fiction scenarios and singularity theorists like Kurzweil, ideas that are grounded in "endless optimism".

Hanger metaphysics: an perspectival multi-scale model

Imagine that the universe is entirely made of tiny metal wire hangers. Piles and piles of hangers in knotted tangled lumps, covering a massive field (a hangar of hangers) stretching endlessly in all directions. The metal wire hangers are the constituents of the model, but they are not rigidly uniform shapes. The metal is malleable, and hangers can bend and twist around their neighbors. A lump in the pile of hangers could have an arbitrarily complex internal structure of hooks and links.

I am endlessly baffled by 4E theorists who argue that "embodiment" is somehow the unique domain of humans, as if particular machines don't always have bodies situated in particular contexts.

Let's talk about Dreyfus' critique of AI! (Megathread)

https://twitter.com/EvanSelinger/status/1230143556913893377

There were two major philosophical critiques of AI in the 20th century: Dreyfus and Searle.

Searle's arguments were bad and wrong and that's all I have to say about that.

Dreyfus' arguments were slightly better, but they're old and they don't really apply to the AI boom today.

Alright, let's talk about this paper.

The deep issue here is the relationship between the phenomenological embodiment and artifacts. Ultimately, you can't have both. (Thread)

https://twitter.com/Abebab/status/1217800314239307776

FWIW, I generally agree with the paper's stance towards the politics and ethics of AI as a field, and the threats it poses to human welfare.

It's not at all clear to me that recognizing these threats requires strong metaphysical distinctions between human and robot agency.

Computer science should be understood philosophically as a general theory of agency.

Insofar as moral and political theory depend on a theory of agency, they also depend on computer science.

https://twitter.com/RebeccaBuxton/status/1198641545177706506

Virtually none of the philosophers who work on agency have even minimal competence in the fundamentals of computer science.

For a comparable situation, imagine theoretical physics except no one understood calculus, or even why calculus might help.

@Boring_AI @David_Gunkel @tonyjprescott @NoelSharkey @alan_winfield @maria_axente @DorotheaBaur @EmergTechEthics @IEthics @RobMcCargow @ShannonVallor @MachineEthics @ProceedingsIEEE @aimeevanrobot Machines are destroyed all the time, yes. What's interesting, new, and worth studying is the pattern of behavior around robots *specifically* as a social class. Again, the term "bot" has become a slur in 2019. This wasn't the case in 1999. @Boring_AI @David_Gunkel @tonyjprescott @NoelSharkey @alan_winfield @maria_axente @DorotheaBaur @EmergTechEthics @IEthics @RobMcCargow @ShannonVallor @MachineEthics @ProceedingsIEEE @aimeevanrobot Arguing "robots are no different from toasters" in the context of dramatically changing social attitudes towards robots (and relatively stagnant attitudes towards toasters) is being deliberately obtuse.