Turing's three philosophical lessons and the philosophy of information

In this article, I outline the three main philosophical lessons that we may learn from Turing's work, and how they lead to a new philosophy of information. After a brief introduction, I discuss his work on the method of levels of abstraction (LoA), and his insistence that questions could be meaningfully asked only by specifying the correct LoA. I then look at his second lesson, about the sort of philosophical questions that seem to be most pressing today. Finally, I focus on the third lesson, concerning the new philosophical anthropology that owes so much to Turing's work. I then show how the lessons are learned by the philosophy of information. In the conclusion, I draw a general synthesis of the points made, in view of the development of the philosophy of information itself as a continuation of Turing's work. This journal is © 2012 The Royal Society.Peer reviewe

Serum deprivation alters lipid profile in HN9.10e embryonic hippocampal cells

The understanding of the mechanism of apoptosis is important to improve the use of stem cells for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders. Sphingolipids are bioactive molecules involved in the regulation of cell fate. In HN9.10e embryonic hippocampal cells, serum deprivation induces apoptosis preceded by sphingomyelinase activation and raise of ceramide levels. Increasing evidence indicates that individual ceramide species regulated by specific pathways in distinct subcellular compartments might carry out distinct cellular functions, but the ceramides species involved in embryonic hippocampal cell death induced by growth factor deprivation are unknown. In the present paper, by using the UFLC-MS/MS methodology, we have investigated the effect of serum deprivation on the lipid profile in HN9.10e cells. At 48h of serum deprivation, we detected a decrease in cholesterol and increase in sphingosine-1-phoshate 18:1, phosphatidylcholine 18:1 18:0, sphingomyelin 18:1 16:0 and in ceramides 18:1 16:0; we also found an increase in saturated/unsaturated fatty acid ratio in sphingomyelin. We hypothesize that the rearrangement of sphingo- and glycerolipids with increase of saturated fatty acids in serum-deprivated, neural cells might represent a cellular response aimed at holding cholesterol inside the cells

The digital services act: an analysis of its ethical, legal, and social implications

In December 2020, the European Commission issued the Digital Services Act (DSA), a legislative proposal for a single market of digital services, focusing on fundamental rights, data privacy, and the protection of stakeholders. The DSA seeks to promote European digital sovereignty, among other goals. This article reviews the literature and related documents on the DSA to map and evaluate its ethical, legal, and social implications. It examines four macro-areas of interest regarding the digital services offered by online platforms. The analysis concludes that, so far, the DSA has led to contrasting interpretations, ranging from stakeholders expecting it to be more challenging for gatekeepers, to others objecting that the proposed obligations are unjustified. The article contributes to this debate by arguing that a more robust framework for the benefit of all stakeholders should be defined

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

AI Risk Assessment: A Scenario-Based, Proportional Methodology for the AI Act

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) defines four risk categories for AI systems: unacceptable, high, limited, and minimal. However, it lacks a clear methodology for the assessment of these risks in concrete situations. Risks are broadly categorized based on the application areas of AI systems and ambiguous risk factors. This paper suggests a methodology for assessing AI risk magnitudes, focusing on the construction of real-world risk scenarios. To this scope, we propose to integrate the AIA with a framework developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and related literature. This approach enables a nuanced analysis of AI risk by exploring the interplay between (a) risk determinants, (b) individual drivers of determinants, and (c) multiple risk types. We further refine the proposed methodology by applying a proportionality test to balance the competing values involved in AI risk assessment. Finally, we present three uses of this approach under the AIA: to implement the Regulation, to assess the significance of risks, and to develop internal risk management systems for AI deployers

Towards ‘Onlife’ Education. How Technology is Forcing Us to Rethink Pedagogy

[EN] The objective of this chapter is twofold: on the one hand, to provide an explanation for the need we have today to rethink pedagogy based on new realities and the scenarios in which we live, also in education, generated by the technology of our time and, on the other hand, to point out the direction in which we can find a path that leads us to that reflection in the face of the inevitable convergence between technology and pedagogy in which we are today

Ultrasound imaging classifications of thyroid nodules for malignancy risk stratification and clinical management : state of the art

Assessing the risk of malignancy in the thyroid with ultrasound (US) is crucial in patients with nodules, as it can aid in selecting those who should have a fine-needle aspiration (FNA) biopsy performed. Many studies have examined whether the US characteristics of thyroid nodules are useful indicators of histological malignancy. Overall, these investigations have identified a few US features that are significantly more frequent in malignant thyroid nodules which can be coalesced into a defining set to be used as an indicator of a higher risk of malignancy. Despite these efforts, none of these classifications have been widely adopted worldwide, and there are still conflicting recommendations from different institutions. Understanding the role and appropriate utilization of these systems could facilitate the effective interpretation and communication of thyroid US findings among referring physicians and radiologists. In this comprehensive review, we outline the major US classification systems of thyroid nodules published in the last few years

Information and The Brukner-Zeilinger Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: A Critical Investigation

In Brukner and Zeilinger's interpretation of quantum mechanics, information is introduced as the most fundamental notion and the finiteness of information is considered as an essential feature of quantum systems. They also define a new measure of information which is inherently different from the Shannon information and try to show that the latter is not useful in defining the information content in a quantum object. Here, we show that there are serious problems in their approach which make their efforts unsatisfactory. The finiteness of information does not explain how objective results appear in experiments and what an instantaneous change in the so-called information vector (or catalog of knowledge) really means during the measurement. On the other hand, Brukner and Zeilinger's definition of a new measure of information may lose its significance, when the spin measurement of an elementary system is treated realistically. Hence, the sum of the individual measures of information may not be a conserved value in real experiments.Comment: 20 pages, two figures, last version. Section 4 is replaced by a new argument. Other sections are improved. An appendix and new references are adde

Robot rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration \ud

Should we grant rights to artificially intelligent robots? Most current and near-future robots do not meet the hard criteria set by deontological and utilitarian theory. Virtue ethics can avoid this problem with its indirect approach. However, both direct and indirect arguments for moral consideration rest on ontological features of entities, an approach which incurs several problems. In response to these difficulties, this paper taps into a different conceptual resource in order to be able to grant some degree of moral consideration to some intelligent social robots: it sketches a novel argument for moral consideration based on social relations. It is shown that to further develop this argument we need to revise our existing ontological and social-political frameworks. It is suggested that we need a social ecology, which may be developed by engaging with Western ecology and Eastern worldviews. Although this relational turn raises many difficult issues and requires more work, this paper provides a rough outline of an alternative approach to moral consideration that can assist us in shaping our relations to intelligent robots and, by extension, to all artificial and biological entities that appear to us as more than instruments for our human purpose