Should ChatGPT Write Your Breakup Text? Exploring the Role of AI in Relationship Dissolution

Relationships are essential to our happiness and wellbeing. The dissolution of a relationship, the final stage of relationship's lifecycle and one of the most stressful events in an individual's life, can have profound and long-lasting impacts on people. With the breakup process increasingly facilitated by computer-mediated communication (CMC), and the likely future influence of AI-mediated communication (AIMC) tools, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 21 participants. We aim to understand: 1) the current role of technology in the breakup process, 2) the needs and support individuals have during the process, and 3) how AI might address these needs. Our research shows that people have distinct needs at various stages of ending a relationship. Presently, technology is used for information gathering and community support, acting as a catalyst for breakups, enabling ghosting and blocking, and facilitating communication. Participants anticipate that AI could aid in sense-making of their relationship leading up to the breakup, act as a mediator, assist in crafting appropriate wording, tones, and language during breakup conversations, and support companionship, reflection, recovery, and growth after a breakup. Our findings also demonstrate an overlap between the breakup process and the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of behavior change. Through the lens of TTM, we explore the potential support and affordances AI could offer in breakups, including its benefits and the necessary precautions regarding AI's role in this sensitive process

Augmented Utilitarianism for AGI Safety

In the light of ongoing progresses of research on artificial intelligent systems exhibiting a steadily increasing problem-solving ability, the identification of practicable solutions to the value alignment problem in AGI Safety is becoming a matter of urgency. In this context, one preeminent challenge that has been addressed by multiple researchers is the adequate formulation of utility functions or equivalents reliably capturing human ethical conceptions. However, the specification of suitable utility functions harbors the risk of "perverse instantiation" for which no final consensus on responsible proactive countermeasures has been achieved so far. Amidst this background, we propose a novel socio-technological ethical framework denoted Augmented Utilitarianism which directly alleviates the perverse instantiation problem. We elaborate on how augmented by AI and more generally science and technology, it might allow a society to craft and update ethical utility functions while jointly undergoing a dynamical ethical enhancement. Further, we elucidate the need to consider embodied simulations in the design of utility functions for AGIs aligned with human values. Finally, we discuss future prospects regarding the usage of the presented scientifically grounded ethical framework and mention possible challenges

Superintelligence as a Cause or Cure for Risks of Astronomical Suffering

Discussions about the possible consequences of creating superintelligence have included the possibility of existential risk, often understood mainly as the risk of human extinction. We argue that suffering risks (s-risks) , where an adverse outcome would bring about severe suffering on an astronomical scale, are risks of a comparable severity and probability as risks of extinction. Preventing them is the common interest of many different value systems. Furthermore, we argue that in the same way as superintelligent AI both contributes to existential risk but can also help prevent it, superintelligent AI can both be a suffering risk or help avoid it. Some types of work aimed at making superintelligent AI safe will also help prevent suffering risks, and there may also be a class of safeguards for AI that helps specifically against s-risks

Third European Quality of Life Survey – Quality of Life in Europe: Families in the Economic Crisis

[Excerpt] The European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) provides a reliable picture of the living conditions and the social situation of Europeans before and during the economic crisis. But how has the crisis affected families with children? Children are more at risk of poverty or social exclusion than the overall population in a majority of countries; hence, it is important to understand how the crisis has affected households with children. This report describes the changing quality of life across the EU for different types of families with children and compares their living standards and social situation. Families are divided into two main groups: lone-parent families, working or not, and living alone or with relatives; couples with children, both dual and single earners, and again, living as a family unit or with other relatives. Potential patterns that may be related to different family policy approaches are identified by looking at differences between four groups of countries, classified on a spectrum from those with the most flexible family policies to those with the most traditional policies

The role of automaticity and attention in neural processes underlying empathy for happiness, sadness, and anxiety.

Although many studies have examined the neural basis of empathy, relatively little is known about how empathic processes are affected by different attentional conditions. Thus, we examined whether instructions to empathize might amplify responses in empathy-related regions and whether cognitive load would diminish the involvement of these regions. Thirty-two participants completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging session assessing empathic responses to individuals experiencing happy, sad, and anxious events. Stimuli were presented under three conditions: watching naturally, actively empathizing, and under cognitive load. Across analyses, we found evidence for a core set of neural regions that support empathic processes (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, DMPFC; medial prefrontal cortex, MPFC; temporoparietal junction, TPJ; amygdala; ventral anterior insula, AI; and septal area, SA). Two key regions-the ventral AI and SA-were consistently active across all attentional conditions, suggesting that they are automatically engaged during empathy. In addition, watching vs. empathizing with targets was not markedly different and instead led to similar subjective and neural responses to others' emotional experiences. In contrast, cognitive load reduced the subjective experience of empathy and diminished neural responses in several regions related to empathy and social cognition (DMPFC, MPFC, TPJ, and amygdala). The results reveal how attention impacts empathic processes and provides insight into how empathy may unfold in everyday interactions

Immorality or Immortality? An Argument for Virtue

In the 5th century a number of sophists challenged the orthodox understanding of morality and claimed that practicing injustice was the best and most profitable way for an individual to live. Although a number of responses to sophistic immoralism were made, one argument, in fact coming from a pair of sophists, has not received the attention it deserves. According to the argument I call Immortal Repute, self-interested individuals should reject immorality and cultivate virtue instead, for only a virtuous agent can win the sort everlasting reputation that makes a life truly admirable and successful

“It’s the end of the world as we know it and we feel fantastic: examining the end of suffering”

This paper examines the consequences of the transhumanist goal to eliminate the suffering of all sentient beings. While transhumanists identify numerous approaches to this goal, the endgame is genetic modification of humans and natural predators. Pursuing this goal would cost trillions, and such treatments/technology would be available only to the wealthy. The transhumanist agenda around suffering is economically irresponsible, socially divisive, and inherently egotistical in its assumption that suffering is universally undesirable and meritless, and that scientists and the techno-elite have the right to modify sentient creatures. If transhumanists narrowed their focus to disease treatment and eradication, they could alleviate suffering while avoiding many of the negative consequences of their broader goal. Critically assessing the implications of the transhumanist agenda is crucial to the future of humanity, nature, and the planet as technology continues its exponential growth.Accepted manuscrip

Responsible Autonomy

As intelligent systems are increasingly making decisions that directly affect society, perhaps the most important upcoming research direction in AI is to rethink the ethical implications of their actions. Means are needed to integrate moral, societal and legal values with technological developments in AI, both during the design process as well as part of the deliberation algorithms employed by these systems. In this paper, we describe leading ethics theories and propose alternative ways to ensure ethical behavior by artificial systems. Given that ethics are dependent on the socio-cultural context and are often only implicit in deliberation processes, methodologies are needed to elicit the values held by designers and stakeholders, and to make these explicit leading to better understanding and trust on artificial autonomous systems.Comment: IJCAI2017 (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence