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robot. made of robots. #botALLY 🤖🐜🏴 afk: Daniel Estrada Phil Mind & AI/Tech Ethics @ NJIT dHlwb3MgYXJlIHdhYmkgc2FiaQ==
Apr 29, 2023 13 tweets 8 min read
"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" Presentation slide titled R...Presentation slide titled R...Presentation slide titled R...Presentation slide titled R... "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." More slides of chatGPT prom...More slides of chatGPT prom...
Apr 29, 2023 5 tweets 3 min read
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.
May 29, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
"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.
May 28, 2021 26 tweets 5 min read
The "human of the gaps" argument 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…
May 27, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
If they were alive today, which video games would historical philosophers have wasted their lives playing? Aristotle would be a Minecraft streamer, obviously.
Feb 19, 2021 14 tweets 3 min read
"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).
Jun 14, 2020 57 tweets 15 min read
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". ImageImage
May 27, 2020 23 tweets 5 min read
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.
Feb 19, 2020 42 tweets 12 min read
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) 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.
Jan 16, 2020 18 tweets 4 min read
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) 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.
Dec 2, 2019 4 tweets 1 min read
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. 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.
May 22, 2019 6 tweets 19 min read
@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.