Friend or foe?:on the portrayal of moral agency of artificial intelligence in cinema

Abstract. This thesis explores how movies portray AI characters’ moral agency. Moral agency is a term that is used when a person or an entity is capable of moral reasoning performing moral acts. For an agent to be able to perform moral acts it must possess self-conscious awareness and exhibit free will and understanding of moral meaning. A theorietical background of artificial intelligence, moral agency, free will, and the semiotic hierarchy is provided in order to familiarize the reader about the core concepts of the thesis. Semiotic hierarchy provides a theory on meaning making and defines and explains the different levels or requrements involed in meaning making. There are four levels to the semiotic hierarchy: life, consciousness, sign usage and language. Three movies were chosen for the research: I, robot (2004), I am Mother (2019) and Ex Machina (2014). All three movies depict artificial intelligences in various narrative roles and present unique portrayals of the moral dimensions that are involved in creating artificial moral agents. The movies were chosen based on the criteria that the movies have an artificial intelligence that is capable of moral agency and is mobile to some extent. The AIs must also depict various stages of semiotic hierarchy. From each movie notable moments of moral agency and narrative significance are first identified and explained. After this the movies are analysed using content analysis. Two tables of codes were constructed from the data. The first table explores how the characters exhibit e.g. free will, moral agency and semiotic hierarchy, and is constructed by deriving codes from the theoretical background. The second table explores e.g. the narrative role of the AIs and the main moral acts performed by the AIs, and its codes are derived from the movies. These tables allows for an easy comparison of the movies and help identify similarities and differences between them. After analysing the two tables a third table was constructed that divides the AI charaters in two groups: morally justified and morally unjustified, based on similarities the characters share with each other. The morally unjustified AI characters had a notably large influence sphere with multiple active units (drones or robots), based their morality on utilitarianism and were motivated by creating a better, more just world for humans. The morally justified AI characters were all single units, acted based on their self-interest, and were capable of emotions. The former groups moral agency was depicted as a threat and the latter groups moral agency was mostly depicted as a neutral occurence. Additionally, all AI characters advanced on the semiotic hierarchy in a reverse order, meaning language was the easiest level for the AIs to perform. Notably, no AI character was considered to be “alive”. Lastly, a brief discussion is had about the advancements and problems in AI creation by providing real life examples of AIs that have been a topic of discussion in the media in recent years.Ystävä vai ei? : tekoälyistä ja heidän moraalisesta agenttiudesta elokuvissa. Tiivistelmä. Tässä gradussa tutkitaan, miten tekoälyjen moraalinen agenttius käy ilmi elokuvissa. Tekoälyt ovat jo nyt pysyvä osa elämäämme, ja niiden kehitys jatkuu huimaa vauhtia. Niiden moraalisuus, ja etenkin moraalinen agenttius, on kuitenkin vielä vähän tutkittu aihealue. Materiaaliksi valittiin kolme elokuvaa: I, Robot (2004), I am Mother (2019) ja Ex Machina (2014). Gradun taustatutkimukseen käytettiin monipuolisesi filosofisia teorioita kuten semioottinen hierarkia, vapaa tahto ja moraalinen agenttius. Tutkimuksen metodologiaksi valikoitui laadullinen sisältöanalyysi (eng. content analysis), jonka avulla elokuvista identifioitiin kahdenlaisia koodeja: taustatutkimukseen pohjautuvat koodit ja elokuvista esiin nousevat koodit. Nämä koodit jäsenneltiin kahteen taulukkoon, joiden avulla elokuvista löytyviä kohtauksia ja piirteitä pystyttiin vertailemaan keskenään. Taulukoiden vertailusta syntyvän näytön perusteella tekoälyt pystyttiin jakamaan kahteen kategoriaan: niihin, joiden teot olivat moraalisesti oikeutettuja, ja niihin, joiden teot olivat moraalisesti epäoikeutettuja. Epäoikeutetut tekoälyhahmot perustivat moraalisen ymmärryksensä utilitarismiin, pystyivät hallinnoimaan useita yksikköjä eli drooneja kerralla, eivätkä ilmaisseet tunteitaan tai antaneet tunteiden vaikuttaa heidän moraaliseen päätöksentekoonsa. Heidän moraalinen toimintatilansa oli myös laaja, jonka vuoksi he pystyivät tekemään päätöksiä, jotka koskettivat suuria ihmismassoja kerralla. Merkittävintä oikeutetuissa tekoälyhahmoissa oli heidän tunnekykynsä ja se, että he kokivat maailman ihmisenä, eivätkä robottina. Nämä tekoälyt myös hallinnoivat vain yhtä yksikköä kerralla. Tutkimuksen lopussa mainitaan, miten tekoälyjen inhimillistäminen näkyy jo monissa paikoissa. Esimerkiksi Googlen luoma Lamda-keskustelurobotti oli niin vaikuttava, että eräs sen kanssaan työskennellyt tutkija väitti sen omaavan “sielun”. Koska oikean elämän tekoälyn ja tieteisfiktion välinen kuilu on kuroutumassa umpeen teknologian kehittyessä, on tärkeää tutkia, miten reagoimme tekoälyn moraalisuuteen elokuvien ja median kautta

Intertextual Connections in Text Sets: Creating Common Core Curriculum for Middle School Readers

The research question was, How can I design a curriculum unit that uses a text set to teach middle school English students to integrate knowledge and ideas as indicated by the Common Core State Standards? The capstone explores the challenges and steps to addressing the Common Core State Standards in reading, focusing especially on eighth grade standards of Integration of Knowledge and Ideas (standards seven through nine). Key influences for this capstone were Wiggins & McTighe (2005) and Cappiello & Dawes (2013). The author develops a multimedia text set unit for eighth grade students, using the short story “Flowers for Algernon” (Keyes, 1959) as its anchor text. Difficult decisions in lesson scope and text selection are part of the process of creating a text set unit. The unit will be shared online and available to other educators

Developing statistical literacy: Student learning and teacher education

Recent international and national mathematics curriculum guidelines indicate the development of students’ statistical literacy, at different levels of schooling, as a major educational aim. In Portugal, the mathematics syllabus for basic education, which began to be implemented in 2009, gave a greater emphasis on statistics, presenting more demanding learning goals, since the elementary levels. This represented a challenging situation for practicing teachers, requiring them to develop new perspectives about the teaching and learning of statistics. In this context, the project Developing statistical literacy: Student learning and teacher education was planned aiming to study the development of statistical literacy from elementary to secondary education, with special attention to two main issues: i) the characterization of key aspects of students’ statistical literacy, particularly regarding the ability to formulate questions, collect data and represent them to answer those questions, and ii) the development of statistical and didactical knowledge for teaching in different schools levels. As the project unfolded, another research strand associated with students’ statistical reasoning and the necessary conditions for its development emerged

Unwriting food labels: discursive challenges in the regulation of package claims

This article examines the challenges resulting from the regulation of written discourse on food packages. It uses as a case study Hong Kong’s strict new food-labeling law that requires distributers and retailers to remove certain nutritional claims from packages of imported food before they sell them. This practice of redacting unlawful text on packages requires that distributers and retailers engage in complex processes of discursive reasoning, and it some- times results in packages that are difficult for customers to interpret. The case study highlights important issues in the regulation of commercial texts concerning collaboration, intertextuality, and the conflicts that can arise when the principals, authors, and animators of such texts have different agendas

Models and Modelling between Digital and Humanities: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

This Supplement of Historical Social Research stems from the contributions on the topic of modelling presented at the workshop “Thinking in Practice”, held at Wahn Manor House in Cologne on January 19-20, 2017. With Digital Humanities as starting point, practical examples of model building from different disciplines are considered, with the aim of contributing to the dialogue on modelling from several perspectives. Combined with theoretical considerations, this collection illustrates how the process of modelling is one of coming to know, in which the purpose of each modelling activity and the form in which models are expressed has to be taken into consideration in tandem. The modelling processes presented in this volume belong to specific traditions of scholarly and practical thinking as well as to specific contexts of production and use of models. The claim that supported the project workshop was indeed that establishing connections between different traditions of and approaches toward modelling is vital, whether these connections are complementary or intersectional. The workshop proceedings address an underpinning goal of the research project itself, namely that of examining the nature of the epistemological questions in the different traditions and how they relate to the nature of the modelled objects and the models being created. This collection is an attempt to move beyond simple representational views on modelling in order to understand modelling processes as scholarly and cultural phenomena as such

The Theo-Logic of Paul\u27s Ethics in Recent Research: Crosscurrents and Future Directions in Scholarship in the Last Forty Years

This essay presents a survey of scholarship on the theology or logic (hence ‘theo-logic’) of Paul’s ethics in the last forty years. Exploring the work of such prominent Pauline scholars as V.P. Furnish, P. Sampley, W. Schrage, R. Hays and D. Horrell, attention will be drawn to their contributions as well as future desiderata in this field. An important conclusion drawn from this study is that Furnish’s work is a milestone in Paul’s theo-logic of ethics especially with regard to eschatological, Christological and sociological dimensions, and subsequent Pauline interpreters have largely expanded on his work. Such elaborations, though, have often been necessary and welcome as new trends in scholarship have yielded great insights not possible in the late 1960s when Furnish penned his tome

Україна – Канада: сучасні наукові студії

The materials of the international collective monograph show the latest Ukrainian-Canadian socio-political, historical, philological, cultural, educational and pedagogical research in the field of modern Canadian Studies. The monograph includes the investigations by several scientists from Ukraine and Canada (from Edmonton, Lutsk, Kyiv, Lviv, and Sumy). Such publication comes out in Ukraine for the first time. For scholars, postgraduates and doctoral students, undergraduates and lecturers of the faculties of international relations, foreign philology, history, political science, philology and journalism, education and social work, Canadian centres in Ukraine and centres of Ukrainian Studies in Canada, as well as for anyone interested in research of Ukrainian-Canadian relations