7,927 research outputs found

    Self-Governing Hybrid Societies and Deception

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    Self-governing hybrid societies are multi-agent systems where humans and machines interact by adapting to each other’s behaviour. Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have brought an increasing hybridisation of our societies, where one particular type of behaviour has become more and more prevalent, namely deception. Deceptive behaviour as the propagation of disinformation can have negative effects on a society's ability to govern itself. However, self-governing societies have the ability to respond to various phenomena. In this paper we explore how they respond to the phenomenon of deception from an evolutionary perspective considering that agents have limited adaptation skills. Will hybrid societies fail to govern deceptive behaviour and reach a Tragedy of The Digital Commons? Or will they manage to avoid it through cooperation? How resilient are they against large-scale deceptive attacks? We provide a tentative answer to some of these questions through the lens of evolutionary agent-based modelling, based on the scientific literature on deceptive AI and public goods games

    Broken supply chains and local manufacturing innovation:Responses to Covid-19 and their implications for policy

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    The immense scale of the pandemic healthcare supply crisis across Sub-Saharan Africa showed that a stronger industrial base allowed India, and some African countries, to better tackle crucial supply gaps. Governments have been forced by Covid-19 into developing new “socio-technical imaginaries”: shared visions of what is possible and important for local health security. The pandemic confirmed widespread pre-pandemic African predictions that in a major crisis, African countries would find themselves at the back of the queue; that truth is driving a new recognition of industrialisation’s role in building local health security, including the huge challenge of cancer care in Africa.</p

    An Exploration of Life With a Chronic Skin Condition

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    Despite considerable prevalence and clinical impact, chronic skin conditions have received little sociological attention. This research examines the social implications of living with a chronic skin condition, based on the thematic analysis of in-depth interviews featuring 24 adults with experiences of eczema, psoriasis or acne. Drawing on Bourdieusian field theory and corporeal phenomenology, this thesis brings new insight to the disembodying experiences of disordered skin, strategies enacted for their management, and the wider implications of disordered skin on social participation. Illustrating experiences of social dys-appearance, individuals are found to negotiate stigma, both enacted and perceived, based on normative expectations of bodily presentation. Employing the notion of aesthetic capital, disordered skin is shown to impair possibilities for aesthetic distinction and undermine a sense of capability in personal and working roles. Faced with disabling spatialities and difficulties surrounding disclosure, individuals develop anticipatory dispositions and a range of time-space tactics. The corporeal dys-appearance of disordered skin demands that individuals respond through laborious practices which often take on Sisyphean attributes. A novel concept of “containing” is introduced as a type of skin work reflecting how managing disordered skin requires attention to clearing up exudations of “dirty” bodily substances, such as skin flakes, blood, pus, and the remnants of topical treatments, to avoid soiling external environments. Pharmaceutical treatments are found to be a source of deep ambivalence. Moreover, individuals value agency in their treatment protocols and, where capital resources allow, enact resistance to medical authority through experimentation with alternative strategies and practices of self-medication. This study highlights a need to accommodate the additional labour demands of life with chronic skin conditions, and the desire for agency in treatment, through policy and practice measures. Further efforts are needed to address the impact of inequalities of access to resources on the burden of managing chronic illness

    A Political Theory of Engineered Systems and A Study of Engineering and Justice Workshops

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    Since there are good reasons to think that some engineered systems are socially undesirable—for example, internal combustion engines that cause climate change, algorithms that are racist, and nuclear weapons that can destroy all life—there is a well-established literature that attempts to identify best practices for designing and regulating engineered systems in order to prevent harm and promote justice. Most of this literature, especially the design theory and engineering justice literature meant to help guide engineers, focuses on environmental, physical, social, and mental harms such as ecosystem and bodily poisoning, racial and gender discrimination, and urban alienation. However, the literature that focuses on how engineered systems can produce political harms—harms to how we shape the way we live in community together—is not well established. The first part of this thesis contributes to identifying how particular types of engineered systems can harm a democratic politics. Building on democratic theory, philosophy of collective harms, and design theory, it argues that engineered systems that extend in space and time beyond a certain threshold subvert the knowledge and empowerment necessary for a democratic politics. For example, the systems of global shipping and the internet that fundamentally shape our lives are so large that people cannot attain the knowledge necessary to regulate them well nor the empowerment necessary to shape them. The second part of this thesis is an empirical study of a workshop designed to encourage engineering undergraduates to understand how engineered systems can subvert a democratic politics, with the ultimate goal of supporting students in incorporating that understanding into their work. 32 Dartmouth undergraduate engineering students participated in the study. Half were assigned to participate in a workshop group, half to a control group. The workshop group participants took a pretest; then participated in a 3-hour, semi-structured workshop with 4 participants per session (as well as a discussion leader and note-taker) over lunch or dinner; and then took a posttest. The control group participants took the same pre- and post- tests, but had no suggested activity in the intervening 3 hours. We find that the students who participated in workshops had a statistically significant test-score improvement as compared to the control group (Brunner-Munzel test, p \u3c .001). Using thematic analysis methods, we show the data is consistent with the hypothesis that workshops produced a score improvement because of certain structure (small size, long duration, discussion-based, over homemade food) and content (theoretically rich, challenging). Thematic analysis also reveals workshop failures and areas for improvement (too much content for the duration, not well enough organized). The thesis concludes with a discussion of limitations and suggestions for future theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical research

    Information actors beyond modernity and coloniality in times of climate change:A comparative design ethnography on the making of monitors for sustainable futures in Curaçao and Amsterdam, between 2019-2022

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    In his dissertation, Mr. Goilo developed a cutting-edge theoretical framework for an Anthropology of Information. This study compares information in the context of modernity in Amsterdam and coloniality in Curaçao through the making process of monitors and develops five ways to understand how information can act towards sustainable futures. The research also discusses how the two contexts, that is modernity and coloniality, have been in informational symbiosis for centuries which is producing negative informational side effects within the age of the Anthropocene. By exploring the modernity-coloniality symbiosis of information, the author explains how scholars, policymakers, and data-analysts can act through historical and structural roots of contemporary global inequities related to the production and distribution of information. Ultimately, the five theses propose conditions towards the collective production of knowledge towards a more sustainable planet

    Staging the Robot:Performing Techno-Politics of Innovation for Care Robotics in Japan

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    In response to the challenges posed by a rapidly aging society and its associated socio-economic difficulties, the Japanese government has encouraged the adoption of AI and robotics technologies for care. Conspicuous investments in these technologies in Japan underscore the dominance of techno-politics of innovation and the advocacy for the robotization of care practices. Such narratives — disseminated by the Japanese state, industry, media, and academia — often overlook the perspectives of the expected users of these technologies. This paper, rooted in a 14-month-long ethnographic study conducted at robotics labs in Japan and the UK in 2022–2023, examines the performance and ethical implications of technoscientific imaginaries portraying Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) as already reliable, safe, and efficient. It sheds light on the intricate relationship between science, technology, the state, and society, emphasizing their use as instruments of power for state-led national development objectives. Moreover, it exposes how technology is presented, creating an illusion of efficiency while neglecting the necessity of involving society in co-designing and co-producing these technologies. The paper ultimately advocates for responsible innovation, emphasizing in particular the need for user involvement to ensure these technologies are not only more efficient and reliable, but also more accessible, inclusive, and fairer

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    Industry Platforms: A New Mode of Coordination in the Economy

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    This discussion paper is a plea for an urgently needed shift in perspective: from the concentration of social science research on the ubiquitous platforms of the consumption- and communication-based internet to the investigation of the platform-oriented reorganization of industrial distribution, production and innovation processes, which has so far received far less attention. The paper focuses on two questions. Firstly, what distinguishes industrial platforms from the platforms that characterize the consumption- and- communication-based internet? Can typical peculiarities and overarching characteristics of platform-based forms of work and organization in industry be identified? And secondly, do platforms represent an independent form of organization and coordination of industrial market, production and innovation processes that is substantially different from organized networks? The paper undertakes an empirical mapping and classification of the little explored field of industrial platforms and discusses from a theoretical-conceptual perspective why platforms should be conceived of as a sui generis form of organization whose dominant mode of coordination can be described as rule-based curation
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