Double elevation: Autonomous weapons and the search for an irreducible law of war

What should be the role of law in response to the spread of artificial intelligence in war? Fuelled by both public and private investment, military technology is accelerating towards increasingly autonomous weapons, as well as the merging of humans and machines. Contrary to much of the contemporary debate, this is not a paradigm change; it is the intensification of a central feature in the relationship between technology and war: Double elevation, above one's enemy and above oneself. Elevation above one's enemy aspires to spatial, moral, and civilizational distance. Elevation above oneself reflects a belief in rational improvement that sees humanity as the cause of inhumanity and de-humanization as our best chance for humanization. The distance of double elevation is served by the mechanization of judgement. To the extent that judgement is seen as reducible to algorithm, law becomes the handmaiden of mechanization. In response, neither a focus on questions of compatibility nor a call for a 'ban on killer robots' help in articulating a meaningful role for law. Instead, I argue that we should turn to a long-standing philosophical critique of artificial intelligence, which highlights not the threat of omniscience, but that of impoverished intelligence. Therefore, if there is to be a meaningful role for law in resisting double elevation, it should be law encompassing subjectivity, emotion and imagination, law irreducible to algorithm, a law of war that appreciates situated judgement in the wielding of violence for the collective

Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally?

Artificial reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely used technique in artificial intelligence that provides a general method for training agents to perform a wide variety of behaviours. RL as used in computer science has striking parallels to reward and punishment learning in animal and human brains. I argue that present-day artificial RL agents have a very small but nonzero degree of ethical importance. This is particularly plausible for views according to which sentience comes in degrees based on the abilities and complexities of minds, but even binary views on consciousness should assign nonzero probability to RL programs having morally relevant experiences. While RL programs are not a top ethical priority today, they may become more significant in the coming decades as RL is increasingly applied to industry, robotics, video games, and other areas. I encourage scientists, philosophers, and citizens to begin a conversation about our ethical duties to reduce the harm that we inflict on powerless, voiceless RL agents.Comment: 37 page

Varieties of the extended self

This article provides an overview and analysis of recent work on the extended self, demonstrating that the boundaries of selves are fluid, shifting across biological, artifactual, and sociocultural structures. First, it distinguishes the notions of minimal self, person, and narrative self. Second, it surveys how philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists argue that embodiment, cognition, emotion, consciousness, and moral character traits can be extended and what that implies for the boundaries of selves. It also reviews and responds to various criticisms and counterarguments against the extended self. The main focus is on the link between the extended mind and extended self, which has received the most attention in recent literature. But accounts of the extended self developed independently of the extended mind are also briefly discussed. This article ends by drawing out some of the conceptual, methodological, and normative implications of the extended self and suggesting some directions for future research

Animation in the Core of Dystopia: Ari Folman's The Congress

[EN] Ari Folman's The Congress (2013) borrows freely from Stanisaw Lem's dystopian view in his Sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress (1971) to propose the gradual dissolution of the human into an artificial form, which is animation. By moving the action of the novel from a hypothetical future to contemporary Hollywood, Ari Folman gives CGI animation the role of catalyst for changes not only in the production system, but for human thought and, therefore, for society. This way, the film ponders the changing role of performers at the time of their digitalization, as well as on the progressive dematerialization of the film industry, considering a dystopian future where simulation fatally displaces reality, which invites relating The Congress with Jean Baudrillard's and Alan Cholodenko's theses on how animating technologies have resulted in the culture of erasing. Moreover, this article highlights how Lem's metaphor of the manipulation of information in the Soviet era is transformed in the second part of The Congress into a vision of cinema as a collective addiction, relating it to Alexander Dovzhenko's and Edgar Morin's speculative theories of total film - which come close to the potentialities of today's Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. In addition, although The Congress is a disturbing view of film industry and animating technologies, its vision of film is nostalgically retro as it vindicates an entire tradition of Golden Age animation that transformed the star system into cartoons, suggesting the fictionalization of their lives and establishing a postmodern continuum between animation and film.Lorenzo Hernández, MC. (2019). Animation in the Core of Dystopia: Ari Folman's The Congress. Animation. 14(3):222-234. https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847719875072S222234143Eisenstein S (2011[1940–1948]) Disney. In: Bulgakowa O, Hochmuth D (eds) Sergei Eisenstein | Disney, trans. Condren D. Berlin: Potemkin Press, 9–123.Feyersinger, E. (2010). Diegetic Short Circuits: Metalepsis in Animation. Animation, 5(3), 279-294. doi:10.1177/1746847710386432Hachero Hernández, B. (2015). Deformar a la Gorgona: la imagen animada como estrategia para documentar el horror. Con A de animación, (5), 114. doi:10.4995/caa.2015.3542Kriger, J. (2012). Animated Realism. doi:10.4324/9780240814407Silvio, T. (2010). Animation: The New Performance? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20(2), 422-438. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1395.2010.01078.xDelgado Sánchez C (2016) ¡A ver quién se anima! Actores animados, dibujos de carne y hueso. Madrid: Diábolo

Designing companions, designing tools : social robots, developers, and the elderly in Japan

Ce mémoire de maîtrise trace la généalogie d’un robot social, de sa conception à ses différentes utilisations et la manière dont les utilisateurs interagissent avec. A partir d’un terrain de six mois dans une start-up et deux maisons de retraite au Japon, j’interroge la création de Pepper, un robot social crée par la compagnie japonais SoftBank. Pepper a été créé de façon à être humanoïde mais pas trop, ainsi que perçu comme adorable et charmant. Par la suite, je décris comment Pepper et d’autres robots sociaux sont utilisés, à la fois par des développeurs, mais aussi par des personnes âgées, et je souligne une tension existante entre leur utilisation comme des compagnons et des outils. En me basant sur l’anthropologie ontologique et la phénoménologie, j’examine la construction du robot comme une entité avec laquelle il est possible d’interagir, notamment à cause de sa conception en tant qu’acteur social, ontologiquement ambigu, et qui peut exprimer de l’affect. En m’intéressant aux interactions multimodales, et en particulier le toucher, je classifie trois fonctions remplies par l’interaction : découverte, contrôle, et l’expression de l’affect. Par la suite, je questionne ces actes d’agir vers et s’ils peuvent être compris comme une interaction, puisqu’ils n’impliquent pas que le robot soit engagé. J’argumente qu’une interaction est un échange de sens entre des agents engagés et incarnés. Il y a effectivement parfois un échange de sens entre le robot et son utilisateur, et le robot est un artefact incarné. Cependant, seule l’impression d’intersubjectivité est nécessaire à l’interaction, plutôt que sa réelle présence.This master’s thesis traces a genealogy of a social robot through its conception to its various uses and the ways users interact with it. Drawing on six months of fieldwork in a start-up and two nursing homes in Japan, I first investigate the genesis of a social robot created by SoftBank, a Japanese multinational telecommunications company. This social robot is quite humanlike, made to be cute and have an adorable personality. While developers constitute one of the user populations, this robot, along with several others, is also used by elderly residents in nursing homes. By analyzing the uses of these populations, I underline the tension between the social robot as a companion and a tool. Drawing on ontological anthropology and phenomenology I look at how the robot is constructed as an entity that can be interacted with, through its conception as an ontologically ambiguous, social actor, that can express affect. Looking at multimodal interaction, and especially touch, I then classify three functions they fulfill: discovery, control, and the expression of affect, before questioning whether this acting towards the robot that does not imply acting from the robot, can be considered a form of interaction. I argue that interaction is the exchange of meaning between embodied, engaged participants. Meaning can be exchanged between robots and humans and the robot can be seen as embodied, but only the appearance of intersubjectivity is enough, rather than its actual presence

We Have Built You: On the Nature of Artificial Intelligence in Blade Runner and Babylon Babies.

While “Artificial Intelligence” describes cognition occurring on the part of machines, over the last several decades representations in television, film, and literature complicate what might comprise “the natural” relative to intelligence. This article explores what is at stake, besides masterful control, in narratives of intelligence as mediated and technical

Sociomorphing and an Actor-Network Approach to Social Robotics

Most of human-robot interaction (HRI) research relies on an implicit assumption that seems to drive experimental work in interaction studies: the more anthropomorphism we can reach in robots, the more effective the robot will be in 'being social.' The notion of 'sociomorphing' was developed in order to challenge the assumption of ubiquitous anthropomorphizing. This paper aims to explore the notion of sociomorphing by analysing the possibilities offered by actor-network theory (ANT). We claim that ANT is a valid framework to re-think the conceptual couple anthropomorphizing / sociomorphing and answer the following question: What kind of negotiation process and social practices can be developed in HRI, given the notion of sociomorph interactional networks

The Golden Rule as a Heuristic to Measure the Fairness of Texts Using Machine Learning

In this paper we present a natural language programming framework to consider how the fairness of acts can be measured. For the purposes of the paper, a fair act is defined as one that one would be accepting of if it were done to oneself. The approach is based on an implementation of the golden rule (GR) in the digital domain. Despite the GRs prevalence as an axiom throughout history, no transfer of this moral philosophy into computational systems exists. In this paper we consider how to algorithmically operationalise this rule so that it may be used to measure sentences such as: the boy harmed the girl, and categorise them as fair or unfair. A review and reply to criticisms of the GR is made. A suggestion of how the technology may be implemented to avoid unfair biases in word embeddings is made - given that individuals would typically not wish to be on the receiving end of an unfair act, such as racism, irrespective of whether the corpus being used deems such discrimination as praiseworthy