Empowerment or Engagement? Digital Health Technologies for Mental Healthcare

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare

Unreduced Dynamic Complexity: Towards the Unified Science of Intelligent Communication Networks and Software

Operation of autonomic communication networks with complicated user-oriented functions should be described as unreduced many-body interaction process. The latter gives rise to complex-dynamic behaviour including fractally structured hierarchy of chaotically changing realisations. We recall the main results of the universal science of complexity (http://cogprints.org/4471/) based on the unreduced interaction problem solution and its application to various real systems, from nanobiosystems (http://cogprints.org/4527/) and quantum devices to intelligent networks (http://cogprints.org/4114/) and emerging consciousness (http://cogprints.org/3857/). We concentrate then on applications to autonomic communication leading to fundamentally substantiated, exact science of intelligent communication and software. It aims at unification of the whole diversity of complex information system behaviour, similar to the conventional, "Newtonian" science order for sequential, regular models of system dynamics. Basic principles and first applications of the unified science of complex-dynamic communication networks and software are outlined to demonstrate its advantages and emerging practical perspectives

Memories of inauthenticity: Stiegler and the lost spirit of capitalism

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Enaction-Based Artificial Intelligence: Toward Coevolution with Humans in the Loop

This article deals with the links between the enaction paradigm and artificial intelligence. Enaction is considered a metaphor for artificial intelligence, as a number of the notions which it deals with are deemed incompatible with the phenomenal field of the virtual. After explaining this stance, we shall review previous works regarding this issue in terms of artifical life and robotics. We shall focus on the lack of recognition of co-evolution at the heart of these approaches. We propose to explicitly integrate the evolution of the environment into our approach in order to refine the ontogenesis of the artificial system, and to compare it with the enaction paradigm. The growing complexity of the ontogenetic mechanisms to be activated can therefore be compensated by an interactive guidance system emanating from the environment. This proposition does not however resolve that of the relevance of the meaning created by the machine (sense-making). Such reflections lead us to integrate human interaction into this environment in order to construct relevant meaning in terms of participative artificial intelligence. This raises a number of questions with regards to setting up an enactive interaction. The article concludes by exploring a number of issues, thereby enabling us to associate current approaches with the principles of morphogenesis, guidance, the phenomenology of interactions and the use of minimal enactive interfaces in setting up experiments which will deal with the problem of artificial intelligence in a variety of enaction-based ways

Prudence, Sunk Costs, and the Temporally Extended Self

Many find it reasonable to take our past actions into account when making choices for the future. In this paper, I address two important issues regarding taking past investments into account in prudential deliberation. The first is the charge that doing so commits the fallacy of honoring sunk costs. I argue that while it is indeed irrational to care about sunk costs, past investments are not sunk costs when we can change their teleological significance, roughly their contribution to our excellence as temporally extended, reasons-responsive, and goal-directed agents. I suggest some general principles for evaluating such significance. Second, it’s a live issue whether we should care about the fate of our past projects, even if we can now affect it. I reject Dale Dorsey’s recent answer, and argue that the puzzle he addresses turns out to be merely apparent, if we take seriously the fact that we are temporally extended

Autonomy: a review and a reappraisal

In the field of artificial life there is no agreement on what defines ‘autonomy’. This makes it difficult to measure progress made towards understanding as well as engineering autonomous systems. Here, we review the diversity of approaches and categorize them by introducing a conceptual distinction between behavioral and constitutive autonomy. Differences in the autonomy of artificial and biological agents tend to be marginalized for the former and treated as absolute for the latter. We argue that with this distinction the apparent opposition can be resolved

Communication technologies and education: Lessons in the potential of innovation

The evaluation of initiatives in using new forms of technology to enhance teaching and learning will raise awareness of the need for a structured and principled approach to the introduction of innovative methods. This paper addresses the pedagogical potential of communication technology for curricular development in schools, initial teacher education and continuing professional development. It establishes principles of practice based on activities undertaken within a national project involving schools and higher‐education institutions