AI & Society最新文献

In contemporary artificial intelligence, the challenge is making intricate connectionist systems—comprising millions of parameters—more comprehensible, defensible, and rationally grounded. Two prevailing methodologies address this complexity. The inaugural approach amalgamates symbolic methodologies with connectionist paradigms, culminating in a hybrid system. This strategy systematizes extensive parameters within a limited framework of formal, symbolic rules. Conversely, the latter strategy remains staunchly connectionist, eschewing hybridity. Instead of internal transparency, it fabricates an external, transparent proxy system. This ancillary system’s mandate is elucidating the principal system’s decisions, essentially approximating its outcomes. Leveraging natural language processing as our analytical lens, this paper elucidates both methodologies: the hybrid method is underscored by the compositional vector semantics, whereas the purely connectionist method evolves as a derivative of neural semantic parsers. This discourse extols the merits of the purely connectionist approach for its inherent flexibility and for a pivotal delineation: segregating the explanatory apparatus from the operational core, thereby rendering artificial intelligence systems reminiscent of human cognition.

Robots that incorporate the function of apologizing have emerged in recent years. This paper examines the moral permissibility of making robots apologize. First, I characterize the nature of apology based on analyses conducted in multiple scholarly domains. Next, I present a prima facie argument that robot apologies are not permissible because they may harm human societies by inducing the misattribution of responsibility. Subsequently, I respond to a possible response to the prima facie objection based on the interpretation that attributing responsibility to a robot is analogous to having an attitude toward fiction. Then, I demonstrate that there are cases of robot apologies where the prima facie objection does not apply, by considering the following two points: (1) apology-related practices found in our human-to-human apologies, and (2) a difference in the degree of harm caused by robot failures and the resulting apologies. Finally, given the current norms governing our apology-related practices, I argue that some instances of making robots apologize are permissible, and I propose conducting critical robotics research questioning the validity of such norms.

Mark Coeckelbergh (Int J Soc Robot 1:217–221, 2009) argues that robot ethics should investigate what interaction with robots can do to humans rather than focusing on the robot’s moral status. We should ask what robots do to our sociality and whether human–robot interaction can contribute to the human good and human flourishing. This paper extends Coeckelbergh’s call and investigate what it means to live with disembodied AI-powered agents. We address the following question: Can the human–AI interaction contribute to our moral development? We present an empirically informed philosophical analysis of how the AI personal assistant Siri changes its users’ way of life, based on the responses obtained from 20 semi-directive individual interviews with Siri users. We identify changes in the users’ social interaction associated with the adoption of Siri. These changes include: (1) the indirect effect of reducing opportunities of human interaction, (2) the second-order effect of diminished expectations toward each other in a community, and (3) the acquired preference to obtain hassle-free interaction with Siri over human interaction. We examine them in relation to concerns that are voiced in the current debates over the rise of AI, namely the suspicion that humans could become overly reliant on AI (Danaher 2019) and the worry that social AI could impede on moral development (Fröding and Peterson, Ethics Inf Technol 23:207–214, 2012; Li, Ethics Inf Technol 23:543–550, 2021). We analyze the ethical costs that come from these changes in light of virtue ethics and address potential objections along the way. We end by offering directions for thinking about how to live with AI personal assistant while preserving favorable conditions for moral development.